It was a neighborhood thing. Your street cred was only as strong as the family that sprung you. Brothers and sisters surround, but it is the old man that guides the ship. This old man had a mysterious sense of power in his eyes. Whereas he imagined that other fathers ran small businesses, or sat in corporate cubicles, or drove to nearby states selling paint or shoes, this old man was connected to something far larger. Even when we were young, he was considered “the godfather.”
Yet beyond the quiet closing and opening of cell doors, the onset of age and the subsequent arrival of disrupted mental and physical health, he had humor. People gravitated in the direction of his stories and his bellowed laughter. He was a man of grand vision and unlimited possibility. He was a man of the neighborhood.
Yet in the end, he was a man of limited time, and last Thursday, at 93 years of age, that time ticked, ticked, ticked, to a stop.
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