To My Friend Nero...
I had this friend once.... his name was Nero Pruitt. It was my first year of attending the local Junior college and It was his last as a teacher there. I didn't take any of his classes, rather I got to know him from sharing a table at lunch and we just started talking. He was one of those people who you knew was just what he seemed, unassuming, modest, but with a wickedly poignant sense of humor and deep well of wisdom from a long life well lived. He had very thin white wispy hair and when he took off his baseball cap (that never matched his tweed suit) his hair would poof out on the sides to complete the whole "Yoda" look, in his case very apropos.
I remember that summer, he hired me to clean these hard to get to windows in the hundred year old house he lived in with his wife. The inside was well lit with plenty of windows and full of books (mostly his) and paintings (his wife's) and lovely hard wood displays that he had made to show off his geology collection (mmm, pretty rocks). His wife had the top most room as her weaving room, floor to ceiling windows on all sides and filled with this old oak loam. She was just as cute as he was, and they sat and talked in the back yard and he kept making her laugh with some story from school. I couldn't hear what he said exactly ... hanging like I was three stories up on the side of this old house scraping paint from the leaded windows, but It was amazing to me that two people could know each other for almost 60 years and still have so much to talk about. After I had finished Nero and I sat in the shade of a huge cottonwood tree and had Iced tea and some Vanilla Wafers (his vice of choice). The subject of age came up and he asked how old I was...I had just turned 20 that week, and he told me about his 20th birthday. His dad had died that year, and he, as the eldest of the family had to work to support the family. He took the bus into town to work each day but that night, it didn't show up for some reason so he was stuck sitting at this little cafe for many hours. He took out a piece of paper and started to write, just writing from the heart, everything he felt, about his father dying the burden of being responsible for the family, how it felt to be spending his 20th birthday all alone in an empty dinner. Then he said his hand just kept writing, and his views on all sorts of subjects just kept coming out. As simply and as honestly as he could, he wrote down what it felt like to be a 20 year old man, and what his hopes and dreams for the future were. When he finished, he put the date and time on the now stack of papers, stuffed them into an envelope and sealed it. On the cover he wrote... "To my son, on his 20th Birthday".
Nero got married rather late in life (for the time) and ended up having one son and a daughter. He said he couldn't be there for his sons 20th birthday, since his son was away at college and Nero was teaching back east at the time. He did send him a special package, with clean socks, T-shirts, new books he thought he would like, some extra spending money..... and a very old yellow envelope that had not been open in some 27 years.
That was Nero, I heard today that he died last night, his wife passed away last year and I'm sure he didn't want to hang around this place without her. He was one of the best people I ever met. He is sorely missed
I remember that summer, he hired me to clean these hard to get to windows in the hundred year old house he lived in with his wife. The inside was well lit with plenty of windows and full of books (mostly his) and paintings (his wife's) and lovely hard wood displays that he had made to show off his geology collection (mmm, pretty rocks). His wife had the top most room as her weaving room, floor to ceiling windows on all sides and filled with this old oak loam. She was just as cute as he was, and they sat and talked in the back yard and he kept making her laugh with some story from school. I couldn't hear what he said exactly ... hanging like I was three stories up on the side of this old house scraping paint from the leaded windows, but It was amazing to me that two people could know each other for almost 60 years and still have so much to talk about. After I had finished Nero and I sat in the shade of a huge cottonwood tree and had Iced tea and some Vanilla Wafers (his vice of choice). The subject of age came up and he asked how old I was...I had just turned 20 that week, and he told me about his 20th birthday. His dad had died that year, and he, as the eldest of the family had to work to support the family. He took the bus into town to work each day but that night, it didn't show up for some reason so he was stuck sitting at this little cafe for many hours. He took out a piece of paper and started to write, just writing from the heart, everything he felt, about his father dying the burden of being responsible for the family, how it felt to be spending his 20th birthday all alone in an empty dinner. Then he said his hand just kept writing, and his views on all sorts of subjects just kept coming out. As simply and as honestly as he could, he wrote down what it felt like to be a 20 year old man, and what his hopes and dreams for the future were. When he finished, he put the date and time on the now stack of papers, stuffed them into an envelope and sealed it. On the cover he wrote... "To my son, on his 20th Birthday".
Nero got married rather late in life (for the time) and ended up having one son and a daughter. He said he couldn't be there for his sons 20th birthday, since his son was away at college and Nero was teaching back east at the time. He did send him a special package, with clean socks, T-shirts, new books he thought he would like, some extra spending money..... and a very old yellow envelope that had not been open in some 27 years.
That was Nero, I heard today that he died last night, his wife passed away last year and I'm sure he didn't want to hang around this place without her. He was one of the best people I ever met. He is sorely missed