Larry of the Sneakers, the Whitest of White & The Great Walls Around Me, a Mile High and Two Miles Wide
It was around Christmas, and I was home from college for the holidays when my father told me that Larry had been shot and killed. When my dad told me this, he looked down, silent, seeing whatever in his mind he saw, thinking more thoughts about Larry, sad thoughts, I knew, because he was a good man, because he always seemed to know more about Larry than he told me.
Perhaps my dad also had deeper thoughts of me, his only son, an incomprehensible horror to him that he could take nowhere if I had been the one shot and killed. As I looked at him, I thought sadly of how he would not be able to understand my death if I had been shot, being not a thing that would already have its given place in his tidy garage among the tools that shaped and defined his life, for him a deep tragedy beyond words, an event he would never be able to voice in Spanish or English to anyone. This I also knew.
My mind then stopped, until slowly my own first sad thoughts took shape and I realized that it seemed right for my dad, my poor dad, to tell me of Larry’s death, for I had been with him when, as a boy of nine, I first met Larry and his white sneakers almost dancing with life, and much of my father and my relationship with him wrapped around my times and understanding of Larry.
Sadly, I also thought how appropriate to learn of Larry’s death at Christmas time, as one of my most vivid and lasting yet wide-eyed and disturbing memories of Larry was on Christmas Day years ago, when I was then a boy of eleven. And…it was more than just the season of the year that seemed appropriate, for it was also the setting of the news – me being home for the holidays – that seemed right, a setting that spoke peacefully of the years in which I knew Larry in grammar school
For here, in the dining and family room – one huge room, always new to me, built a year or so before I left for college to connect the two houses we lived in as a family forever and not really part of my life growing up at home – the colored lights of the Christmas tree across the room in a corner twinkled and glowed, and next to the tree, an end table sat festooned with a large half-used red Christmas candle and fake plastic holly with red berries placed around three framed high school graduation pictures, one of them, of me. Next to the end table, stretched a long and elegant if now outdated stereo playing my mom’s favorite Perry Como Christmas album.
A fire in the huge brick fireplace washed the room and everything in it with gold and red making this Christmas time seem, well, a lot like Christmas. And except for the fireplace, it was a scene much like our Christmases in the living room of the front house when I knew Larry in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and everything spoke of a time of peace and fairly idyllic family life, a life that I don’t think Larry ever fully experienced despite the best efforts of the couple I knew as his aunt and uncle with whom he lived.
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