George, the 67 yr old ex-con, ex-drunk gentleman who has shared my house for coming on two years now, is leaving. Going back to Rhode Island to live with his two older sisters on October 8^th.  His sister is picking him up, to carry him out of my life forever. 

He’s a soft guy who probably had to be very hard in prison, or maybe not. Certainly he  knows his prison etiquette--- we have discussed The Joint many times---but Georgie is inherently an innocent, a very loveable character whom the Boys in the Big House would have come to for soft reassurance of the worth of their  grasping for an “Outsider” moral code.  George did fine in prison.  Still has his little transistor radio he bought from the “commissary”. It was in one of his drawers he was cleaning out and packing.  Masking tape held it together. It still works. He’d listen to the ball games on it, if he had money for batteries during his 8 year “bid”.

He wants me to disconnect his cable box the morning of his departure. It is far beyond his ability to unscrew coaxial cables .  His “extended-cable’’ & phone package has served him well, that’s for sure. He watches endless repeats of “Little House on the Prarie” and “the Waltons” , and of course the news.

Soon that little room downstairs in our boarding house will contain a stranger.

 We  will miss George, we “old men” as we call ourselves---

me;

“Sarge’’,

a soft Southern boy who was sent to  Vietnam to serve his nation & is now a fine actor on our stage of the absurd, cussin’ up a storm at everyone, known far and wide to have a ferocious temper,  pretending to hate his buddy George, with whom he religiously watches WWF wrestling, talking like a polite gentleman to me when he meets me on the way to the bathroom we share on the upper floor;

and Robert Frost , a 55 year old bald innocent in love with a 25 year old gal in state prison…

We stink up the walls of this 125 year old house with our incessant smoking. A couple of women tried to live with us, at different times. A depressed little “sober girl” from the Sober House next door who went on to greener pastures, and a flaming Cuban lesbian who sang hymns to the Lord at odd hours and had a fatally  disharmonious relationship with Sarge. Though George liked her: she was always  promising to bring over “her girls” and have them do a striptease for him, because he seemed so sad.

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George. Georgie.

My dad’s name was George, and my new nephew 14 week old Labrador puppy is named Georgie.

These meaningless coincidences comfort me.

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My best friend Riz is in the hospital now for mental readjustment. He checked himself in , after experiencing paranoid violent thoughts . He is gone for awhile. It is best he be cared for by professionals, I tell myself.

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People come and go in our lives, I have learned from experience. We usually dismiss it as part of modern society being uprooted and chaotically coincidental.  We are told to gracefully accept this.  I will try.