Between waking and sleep...

...a name came to me. George Sinclair. "Yes, that was his name", I thought incredulously as once again I dragged myself out of bed and to my recliner to relieve the constant, unyielding back pain. Funny he didn't come to mind during these painful months after all these years. Here I am feeling sorry for myself once again, and George comes to mind.
    He was an old friend of my family for many many years as I grew up. A World War II veteran buddy of my dad's. George was distinctive in or out of a crowd as he had a bizarre curvature of the spine that forced him to walk bent over at a 90º angle from the waist. To even us kids, he had to lift his craggy, wrinkled face with the sharp bony Dickensish chin from it's constant view of the ground to look us children in the eye as he spoke. There was such a sparkle in his eyes through all that pain he must have suffered alone and always a twisted smile that was both frightening while kind and welcoming at the same time.  Medical practice hadn't come very far in the 1950s and there were no solutions for this old veteran. Everyone wondered, everyone envied him his beautiful well endowed wife who remained constant to him and clung to him with such love and devotion. Somehow he sired 9-10 kids who all adored him, and his word was law though he never raised a hand to them. We kids always thought it a freakish disgusting picture in our minds, of him having relations with his wife. We didn't even joke about it.
      He must have known our fear and repulsion at the sight of him coming toward us in his strange gait that made his long arms swing ape-like behind his buttocks as he walked, for he always had wrapped hard candies in his pocket for us all. George was a hard worker  and though we ever knew what he did, it was enough that he never borrowed money from any of us, who were hardly any better off than he was. He always kept his family fed, well clothed, and in a nice house which his wife kept immaculate while he himself wore grease and oil stained clothes and always smelled to high heaven.  In fact during our hard times, he always brought food to the house or hand me down clothes from his kids. And he always had an extra pack of Pall Mall's for my folks. And though  a chain smoker, we never saw him take a drink that somehow my father always had to offer.
     I last remember him in my late teens, just before my high school graduation. He was terribly bent over and his hands shook involuntarily. He was dressed up with a sort of old 40s suit coat but still with old work khaki's, baggy and wrinkly, and one of those extra wide ties that hung perpendicularly straight down from his bent body. He could hardly hold the old flip top lighter to the end of his cigarette as the cigarette shook and wobbled up and down in his mouth.
   I don't blog much, but it just seemed important to write him up tonight...to honor him, and be sure I didn't forget him. As freakish as he was then, in my memory he is  one of my heroes.