John Brown, 7/4/34 — 10/30/05
Damn. Mary just called to tell me that John Brown, one of our regular customers, passed away.
John started coming in every day about a year and a half, two years ago. He was 71, and had just divorced his wife of fifty-some years (due to her being somewhat insane and mean). John was a good old guy, just full of piss n’ vinegar — very funny and generous, frequently lent the girls money when they needed it, bought one gal new tires for her car, and bought concert tickets for a friend of mine and me.
He’d been in and out of the hospital a lot in the last couple of months, with near-constant lung problems, as well as a host of other health problems. He stopped coming in about two weeks ago, so we called the hospital to see if he was back in. He wasn’t, so, worried, we looked up his address and sent Mary out to check on him. He’d been looking really bad just before he stopped showing up, and I was kind of worried that Mary would get to his house and find a dead body. Fortunately, she did not. John was there, said he was sick, but doing all right, and that he’d be back in soon enough. He told Jack to tell us not to worry about him, he’d be fine.
I guess there was a partial obituary in the newspaper this morning — the full one will be in the paper on Monday or Tuesday or something. To be honest, I wasn’t very surprised to get the news. Like I said, John had been looking bad, and I’d been figuring he wouldn’t make it much longer, a couple of months ago. I think he was expecting it too, from some of the things he said. He wasn’t much concerned about dying, as he’d already died two or three times, when he was in the army, and later on — died on the operating table, once (maybe twice?), but they brought him back, and so sick he should have died, once. He seemed to consider himself on borrowed time as it was, and he said he’d had a good long life, and wasn’t too worried about it.
So. Good to have known you, John. I’m glad I got to meet you before you went along on whatever comes next. We’ll all miss you like hell around the Restaurant Where I Work(TM).
