UNAPPRECIATED

For some time I believed his name to be Charlie, although it was Gary.

This was perhaps due to the fact that he was always sleuthing past midnight on a giant prehistoric-looking desktop that faced out the window, and that he was Chinese—like Charlie Chan, the fictitious sleuth of over four dozen films.

Anyways, his name wasn't Charlie, and his sleuthing, I would later discover, was actually an addiction he harbored for Ebay.

He was often hunched, looking something like a turtle with his wide eyes and pursed lips, had a thin drooping mustache, grey hair, and almost always wore a large feathered cowboy hat.

That was the odd little man who bought 99.cent coffees from me during my stretch at Hailey Coffee Company. The same strange fellow who became my neighbor back in April and was always puttering beneath the tree beside his deck with a rake.

He's dead now.

Heart failure or something.

Snow crunches beneath my feet as I approach the sidewalk, headed for home, and pass the now-vacant condo that was once his. A sign has been affixed to the window, it's black and orange and says: FOR RENT, framed by masking-tape.

As I pass, I notice a small pile of raked needles covered by snow.

The guy was tenacious, ridiculous, absurd—yet singular, important, an individual, someone overlooked but so critical in this world of glamour and conformity.

A real character.

I never really took the time to appreciate that.

He spoke slow, and I was always moving too fast.