This is the first of a two-part story. Each part is complete within itself, yet complement one another. My hope is that you'll share the insight and goodwill that Captain John inspires with all.
I think every person is special, offering up their uniqueness to everyone they meet. But sometimes, someone touches a life with a presense so special and endearing that you never want to, or indeed could you, forget them. And so entered a man into my life on a breezy, late spring morning, back in 1941. Lets see, that would be around 50-some odd years ago. I can close my eyes now, and all the sights and sounds come back...
Captain John wasn't really a captain at all, at least no one I knew ever thought he was. He called himself that, and so did everyone else. He just showed up in town one day.
The first time I laid eyes on him was at Bill Sheldon's barber shop. I was a short, scrawny kid of 11, making what change I could shining shoes at Bill's after school.
I suppose being young and short made lots of things seem bigger than they really were. But when I came through the barber shop's squeaky screen door that afternoon, well, there, sitting in the elevated chair waiting for a shine sat the biggest man I had ever seen and also the blackest. I'd never seen a Negro in the barber shop before.
I don't think being black was something one would choose to be in the town where I grew up. Almost everyone was white-skinned, like me. The few Negroes there lived at one end of town, a few dusty blocks off the main road. Run down, unpainted houses, or rather shacks, were what they called homes. They hardly ever came to the main part of town except to get necessities. Even the Negro kids in school kept to themselves, and for some reason I never questioned why. Everyone seemed to be getting along fine that way; at least that's what my daddy always said.
Bill's barber shop wasn't very big, a little longer than wide, as I recall. When you walked in, if you looked to the right, you'd see my shoe-shine stand pushed against the wall. Down that same side of the room, crammed into the far corner, was a tiny bathroom. And spread out along the wall between my stand and the bathroom were five, shiny-metal-legged chairs with padded, vinyl-covered seats and backs. In front of the chairs stood a long, narrow, wooden table always covered with outdated magazines, the daily newspaper from Chicago, and my towns weekly. About a four-foot wide aisle separated the table from the two barber chairs. Behind the barber chairs and back a bit was a white marble-looking counter holding two oval, white sinks with cabinets below each one. And behind the counter top, the wall was an all glass mirror. A tall, wooden coat rack with graceful, curving arms stood in the other front corner across from my stand. When nothing hung on it, it reminded me of a sentry at attention guarding the place. Except for the slowly turning, four-blade fan that hung down from the high ceiling in the center of the room, that was Bill's barber shop. Oh, yes, one long fluorescent light fixture hung over the aisle in front of the barber chairs. That light and the light that came through the two, large, plate glass windows at the front of the shop provided all the barber shop needed.
As I said, the barber shop wasn't all that big. So it couldn't have been that the others in the shop that morning hadn't noticed the huge Negro man come in and deposit himself in the shoe-shine chair. But it seemed they'd decided to ignore him. The chatter going on among two other men, both of whom I knew, and barber Bill, didn't include him.
Bill acknowledged me with a "Mornin' Jack," as I came in and gave a slight nod in the direction of my customer. I looked over, or maybe I gawked at the man wedged into the strained arms of the shoe-shine chair. He wore a long sleeved, red-checkered shirt, half hidden by dark blue, bib overalls. I hesitatingly approached him.
"Want a shine?" I inquired.
His dark chocolate brown eyes took me in. "It's what I came here for," came a smooth, deep voice. I'd expected this large man to have that kind of voice, but I was startled by the beauty of it. It was kind of like he'd sung the words. Even the chit-chat in the shop stopped for a moment as the three men took in the flavor he had dished out.
I'd looked up at him momentarily and found those eyes, deep-set in his round face, smiling at me. "A fine chair you have here, lad. Fits me well, don't you think?"
There I was hoping the chair would hold together long enough to finish the shine and he asks me that. "Yes, sir," I lied.
I'd never before heard such a deep, full-blown, nothing-held-back roar. The man shook with laughter and slapped his knees in unison with his huge hands. The old chair strained for all its worth. "Fits me well, don't you think?" the black man exploded again. He glanced over at the three white men, who were now silent but smiling and looking his way. Soon the shop came alive with laughter as we all joined in. I never knew for sure why the three men laughed. But I do know I couldn't help but laugh watching the fun the man sitting in my shoe-shine chair was having, even though it came at my expense.
"My name's Captain John," the man said leaning over as much as he could manage, his right hand extended toward me. Tears had left long, shiny lines on his face, and his eyes were wet and sparkling. "It's good to meet you, Jack."
I had just sat down at his feet on the wooden box I used for a stool and had to half-stand while I reached up and did my best to grasp the hand thrust toward me. But its immense size allowed me less than a man-to-man handshake. "Glad to meet you, sir," I said.
"Captain John," he gently insisted, smiling.
"Captain John," I said, returning his smile. Then it dawned on me. He'd called me by name, and I wondered how he knew it. I remember to this day how his calling me "Jack" made me feel important and somehow special.
Settling back down on my stool, I faced a challenge. His boots hadn't been cleaned well or shined for quite a while, that was obvious. They were old, plain, black working boots that went about three-quarters of the way up to his knees. The bottoms of his overall legs were tucked into the wrinkled boot tops. I didn't know whether he'd done that so I wouldn't get any polish on them or he wore them that way. It didn't make any difference though, because there those boots were, sticking out in front of me and demanding a shine.
Like I thought when I first saw Captain John, I didn't know they made boots that big. I glanced up at my hand-made cardboard sign hanging on the wall that read, "Shine 10 cents" and wondered how much it would cost me just for the polish.
I went to work using the toothbrush I kept in water in a pint Mason jar. The caked-on mud, clinging to the narrow area around his boots where the sole overlaps the upper, must have taken me five minutes to get off. It usually didn't take me much longer than that to give a good shine, even to a shabby looking pair of shoes. I remember thinking that my sign would definitely have to be changed. The new sign would most likely read, "Shoe Shine 10 cents - Boots more." Retrieving an old towel from the stand under the shoe-shine chair, I wiped up the mess the muddy water from the boot cleaning had made on the floor.
I'd been working so hard just cleaning Captain John's boots that I hadn't noticed he had joined the other three men in conversation. In fact, he was the conversation.
I turned my head and looked over at the other men. Bill stood behind one of his two barber chairs, hands at his sides with a comb in one and scissors in the other. Fred sat in the barber chair in front of Bill. A black and white striped, hair-covered apron was protecting his clothes and tucked in his shirt collar. Charlie lounged in the other barber chair. All eyes were fixed on my customer as the men listened to his deep, warm, melodic voice. No, not just looking and listening, it was like they were hypnotized. No one so much as moved a finger, at least for the short time I watched them.
Back to the boots now, my mind was divided, half listening to Captain John and half trying to concentrate on my work. Captain John had stopped talking for a moment and Charlie broke in with, "And you watched it all?"
"Yes, you might say I was as close to him as a man can be," replied Captain John. He went on with his story, and I must admit, I more than half-listened.
"After the two men pulled my friend off the tracks, it wasn't but a few minutes until an ambulance came along and whisked him to the county hospital. I went in the ambulance with him. It was a terrible sight to see. The box car wheel had run over his left leg. The bottom of his pant leg was soaked with blood, and his foot had flopped over at an impossible angle. The man writhed in pain, but never lost consciousness. When he wasn't moaning, he was cursing the two men who had dragged him off the tracks and saved his life. He wanted to die in the worst way."
Captain John had his eyes closed while describing the gory scene. I'd stopped putting polish on his boots and was sitting there with a half-full can of polish in one hand and three of the five fingers on my other hand, black with polish.
I listened intently to his words and watched his face contort as he relived that awful time. I recalled wishing I'd heard the story from its start.
Suddenly, he stopped speaking and opened his eyes at the same time, catching me staring at him.
Embarrassed, I quickly looked down at his boots. "Is my story hard for you to listen to, Jack?" He said it like he would stop telling it if it were.
"No, sir, ah, Captain John."
Bill was back to cutting Fred's hair, but it seemed like he was trying to do two things at once, like I was. I glanced over at the quiet men and noticed that Bill had stopped snipping again. His hands were resting on the back of the barber chair, and he was looking at Captain John. He obviously wasn't content with where the story finished, or temporarily finished. He urged Captain John to go on, saying "What happened, Captain? How did losing his leg change him?"
"Well, if my friend hadn't lost part of his leg, he never would have had all that time in the hospital to read and think. That's what changed him. He needed help to look at things in a different way. I surely couldn't help him. But the two men who saved his life could and did.
"The day after the doctors operated and amputated part of his lower leg, the two men showed up in his
hospital room. My friend was partly in another world because of the pain killers and sleeping pills they'd given
him. But later, when I visited him, he did remember their being there. He still had no kind words for them. He told me to tell whoever was in charge that if they came again not to let them in.
"Maybe part of his anger was that those men were white and he was black. White men had never been anything but bad news for him. But something those two men did would completely change how he viewed white people, and all people for that matter, including himself."
Captain John hesitated and cleared his throat, making a deep growling sound. I wasn't aware yet of his eyes looking down at me.
I'd finished smearing polish on Captain John's right boot and was starting on his left. My three blackened fingers took a swipe of polish from the can and started on the boot near the top. I noticed it immediately. The boot caved in when I pushed on it with my fingers. Startled, I shoved again, working the polish back and forth and around to the back of the boot. There was no doubt in my mind. The bottom part of his left leg was much smaller than his right.
Then it hit me. "Holy cow! He's got a wooden leg!" I shouted it to myself. I looked up and found Captain John's brown eyes staring down at me, a slight smile on his face. Without a word, we shared his secret. The story was about him. I got back to my job, smiling, feeling lucky to be the only one there who knew.
Captain John continued his story. "What the men did was to leave him a book and leave him alone. He never saw them again, never knew their names.
"It was a thin book, not many pages. It had a plain, black-and-white-colored cover with nothing written on it. A nurse brought it in to him. ‘Two men left it,’ she said, `and asked me to give it to you when you were feeling better.'
"The book lay there on the stand beside his bed for two days, unopened. In fact, he'd thought of tossing it in the waste basket when the nurse first brought it in. He was still mighty angry with those men.
"It was morning, the third day after he'd received the book. The head of his bed was still cranked up after breakfast. He sat there looking down at the sheets past the hump his left knee made. He strained hard trying to see what wasn't there. Tears in his eyes and a sick feeling in his stomach, he turned away.
"His wet, glazed eyes fell on the book. His right hand slowly reached over and picked it up. Opening the
cover, he read the neat, carefully written message on the first page."
We were all watching as Captain John pulled a sheet of paper from an overall pocket and unfolded it. He began to read:
Friend,
Thanks for briefly sharing your life with us, although, you had no choice.
Now's the time to let go of your old life. Share the marvelous creature that you are, that we all are, with everyone you meet.
Continually give of yourself,
and the riches will pour in, we promise.
Your mind is the key. Know that your every thought is colored by the past.
Put the past away. The future, too. It’s unknowable. Start anew each moment. Meet life without resistance, and all whom you touch will glow a bit brighter.
One day you'll walk again but not without pain. Don't fight it. Let all the pain in as you do the joys. Everything, each moment, is life. Don't waste a second more.
Love
Holding the sheet of worn paper, Captain John said, "This, of course, is a copy of what was written in the book given to me by my friend. If you're wondering what happened to him, I can tell you that his life couldn't be better. As the saying goes, he's a joy to be around."
I had to smile, hearing that last statement. Captain John was having fun and only he and I knew it.
"How about the rest of the book?" Bill said, asking the question that we all had on our minds.
Captain John smiled in Bill's direction. "That's all that was in the book. The rest of the pages were blank."
"Blank?" Bill repeated, unbelieving.
"Yes. It was as though nothing else needed to be said. The blank pages could be filled-in by my friend, if he wished."
"Blank?" Fred said barely loud enough to hear, looking at Charlie.
"I'm afraid that's the end of the story," said Captain John. "I hope you weren't too disappointed."
"I thought it was great," I said, getting up from my stool, having finished shining the boots.
"Good story, Captain. Thanks," said a slightly bewildered Bill. "Can't say that I fully understand what the book was all about though. But I'll think about it."
Captain John looked at his boots and his face lit up. "Wonderful job, Jack. They look new. I know what your sign says, but--" He reached into a side overall pocket as he stood up and came out with two dimes. "Here," he said, "you certainly have earned it."
"Thanks a lot," I said happily, not arguing with him. I reached up and helped him with the step to the barber shop floor.
Captain John walked slowly but surprising well, I thought, over to the barber chairs. He was shaking the mens eager hands when I passed him on my way to the bathroom to clean my black fingers. I could hear Bill say, over the sound of the running water, "Come back soon, Captain."
I hurriedly dried my hands and made it by the bathroom door in time to see him walk through the open front door, his hand over his head, waving goodbye.
I stood there yelling goodbye to him, but I don't think he heard me. I felt sad having missed a real goodbye and maybe having another try at the handshake.
With my head down, I walked past the barber chairs toward my stand. When I saw the black and white book setting on my stool my heart started pounding. I ran the last few steps and snatched it off the stool. Opening the cover, I saw a handwritten message that started off, "Jack". The rest of what it said was a lot like what Captain John had read to us a short time ago, only changed where needed. Captain John hadn't forgotten to say goodbye.
I've read the words on that page many times since then. I've put lots of hours into thinking about them.
And I've spent most of my beautiful life putting what was said into practice.
I met Jerome on a busy city street in Baltimore, Maryland, when he was forty-five years old. On that particular day, I was out and about, enjoying a much-needed day off from work.
I wanted to purchase a sukiyaki sub. I parked my car in an area of
I met Jerome on a busy city street in Baltimore, Maryland, when he was forty-five years old. On that particular day, I was out and about, enjoying a much-needed day off from work.
I wanted to purchase a sukiyaki sub. I parked my car in an area of
