Before moving into the neighborhood in 1998, I'd never seen a flat top haircut before, except maybe Buzz Aldrin on TV. George had one, though, and even in the winter when he'd cover it with his orange knit stocking cap, you knew it was there. George was about as old as you could be without thinking of how old he might be. Nowadays he's even older of course.
George held court three houses down from us in a house with a garage as full of junk and miscellaneous as I'd ever seen. I never saw the inside of the house but I figured it was as full as the garage. Had to be. In thinking about it now, it's quite surprising that the house and garage didn't overflow into the yard, but it didn't. And despite the fullness of the garage, the place never looked like Appalachia. Wish I knew how he pulled that off.
He was amazing in how he kept up with things. Actually, the whole neighborhood was fairly up-to-date on happenings, but George out-snooped everyone else. It didn't take much to bring him strolling past. I'd get out my circular saw or think about pounding a nail or two and he'd just show up. Always stayed on the sidewalk unless you engaged him and got him talking--he just seemed to know where the line was on being a distraction.
Well, most times.
Early on I decided to upgrade the electrical panel and rather than sit down and calculate all the outlets, lights and various loads, I just picked a panel with a good-sized main: 200. Yep, from 60 amps to 200 and I'd need to roll out new wires all the way to the peak of the house. Those wires were thick and pretty ornery so I chose to put them in nice, big 2" conduit.
Well it didn't take George long before he was standing there asking what I had that was so big that I needed 200 amps for my little-bitty starter bungalow. I think he was convinced I had a pot farm in the basement and needed all those amps for the grow lights. I still have the occasional nightmare where I'm working inside a hot meter base with him asking me questions from the sidewalk. I'm sure he was just there to pull me off the live wires if I happened to make accidental contact. Yeah.
I'm not sure George ever got rid of anything. I imagine in his house a drawer with a small box in it labeled "string too short to save". Well, maybe not, but he seemed to keep just about everything.
When a squirrel would deposit an acorn, a walnut or a buckeye in his hedge and forget about it for a year or two, those saplings would get pretty high before he'd think about cutting them down or digging them out. George taught me the meaning behind the old proverb about the best time to plant a tree being twenty years ago and the second-best time being today.
One Fall he showed up in our front yard with a couple of his lost-acorn oaks and a couple of volunteer red maples. Thought we might want a couple of trees in our front yard. Well, I didn't. Trees are trouble, I thought. You have to mow around them and rake their leaves and all kinds of maintenance I didn't have time for.
And I planted them anyway. My wife probably had something to do with that. The oak had been cut once and there was a twisted little part about five feet up on this seven foot tree. I figured I'd be digging it out the next Spring.
Well, that year we planted those two and a year later we moved a green gauge plum to the front yard and a year or so later a peach went into the back yard. My wife probably had something to do with that.
And twelve years later my children are thirty feet off the ground in the most perfectly-shaped pin oak tree that ever was. Even the maple has a lovely figure. And even though you can only get twenty-some feet off the ground in the maple, they climb that one, too.
I will always be proud of George's trees.
I still don't like raking, though.
