Mr. H’s voice was ever-present in my troubled world as a child. I’d hear him call for my best friend, his daughter whose birthday I share, and the warm bass in his vocals, like Bing Crosby’s on White Christmas, would echo inside the cul-de-sac in front of my house. Julie and I would still be laughing about something on those warm California nights, and I’d almost look forward to the soothing sound of it bellowing down the street, even though it meant Julie had to go home.
Unlike my father, Mr. H shouted his daughter’s name with genuine concern. When my father would call for me to come home at high volume, I would shudder, praying that I’d make it up the stairs before his hand struck my back.
It was Julie’s dad who would be the first to model what a loving father sounded like to me. Whenever his Easter Seal blue station wagon would show its nose at the top of the street, his kids would run to him, not away, and crowd around the driveway. I could hear the sweet, low hum of his voice joking with them before he got out of the car, their dog George, then Barnaby after old George had passed on, barking and wagging his tail once Mr. H returned home. This was something new to me as a girl. I never once ran out of the house to welcome my father home, and the dogs I desperately tried to care for at my house were sent to “the pound,” the worst place a dog could go in my mind.
“We can’t afford to keep dogs,” my father told me, as I begged him to change his mind.
Mr. H was meant to care for children and dogs. It was why he was undoubtedly so good at his job as the Executive Director for Easter Seals in our home town in California. Though he had such an important job and role in our community, it seemed to me that he did not care much for titles or “importance” as a man. My father lived for titles and credentials. More importantly, Mr. H was a person his children could trust and went to for advice and comfort. There were so many days as a girl that I wished he was my father too. If he only knew what was actually going on inside my house, just three doors away, what would he have done? But in those days, I couldn’t bring myself to tell Julie or anyone what my father was capable of. I was too ashamed. Meanwhile, Julie had no idea that I was studying her dad’s gentle ways and mannerisms, as he went about his Saturday chores in the backyard, mowed the lawn, fixed things in the garage, walked and washed the dogs, always greeting me with a smile and a chuckle when I’d pass through his door or eat something from his refrigerator. I wanted to tell him about the abuse, but the shame would silence me again, and I’d go on pretending I was fine, like so many kids living with domestic abuse.
When I learned from Julie that he’d passed peacefully last Friday at the age of 88, in the same house on the hill where I spent so many childhood days, Julie's friendship and her family's friendly faces comforting me throughout the years, small and large memories came back.
Mr. H's hair was so gold it almost looked yellow. His eyelashes were missing around his kind blue eyes, they were that blonde. He rocked a mustache but never looked silly or pretentious with it. He was tall and elegant, and his long legs moved with ease and grace. He wore khaki pants and blue boating shoes on the weekends, and they reminded me of The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island, my favorite show. And when he came home and opened the door to his light blue station wagon, he would slow everything way down - or maybe I was the one to slow everything down for safekeeping - and he'd take his time to place his jacket over his shoulder, open up the mailbox, and slowly bend down to hug and kiss his children, ruffling their hair and the furry coats of his adoring dogs.
There are some men that pass through your life that you’d like to forget or erase if you could; men whose actions you can’t shake out of your memory no matter how fast you turn your head. And then there are the men that you’d like to remember, and go on remembering over and over, for their small and large acts of kindness, their booming voices in your life, even if on the periphery. Mr. H is one of those men. He'll never know just how far and wide his loving voice reached me, the girl down the street, pretending, three doors away.
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