a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Tuesday, October 24, 2017


Leonard Huber is sitting at the counter in my kitchen here, drinking his first cup of coffee of the day...a dark-roasted New Orleans chicory I pick up wherever I can find it and keep for him.  He drops in a few (we don't count) sugar cubes and some half-and-half.  He's the kind of coffee-drinker most people used to be in the mornings, and only a few any more are: early in the kitchen, the paper in hand, a hot cup ready to muse over, a slow and deliberate refill a little while later.

His better half, Johanna, is not yet in evidence, but there are signs she'll be up soon...a certain rustling in the back guest room, the squeak of the bathroom door.  I begin a pot of decaf for her and for me.

I'm up because, after all, I'm the supposed hostess, but these guests are so often in my company and so used to things here that we all slide into place easily and let the day begin with whatever we are used to.

For Leonard, the coffee ritual means that even while he's stirring it, he's considering the first story of the day, coming up out of a memory from last week or seven decades ago.

"My grandmother lived next door to us," he begins,"so when I got my drivers license I couldn't be  riding her fancy car just for pleasure.  It was my job to carry her all over town visiting her friends and shopping."  Just what an adolescent boy yearns to spend his spare hours doing in a car.

I've heard this story before, and he tells it the same way almost each time, with the same expression.  Leaning back on the counter stool, his body as resigned now as it must have been driving his grandmother, he goes on to talk about the family cars, and relate a few hapless incidents he and they were involved in.

Sometimes he segues into after-hours exploits with a girl he dated in high school, then stood up, then his friend married. Or the one he delivered to her academic doom helping her climb into her boarding school window too late for curfew.

And speaking of school, though in earlier years, there's the one about his father losing his cool after being told by his teacher, "Your son and my son [his classmate and co-conspirator in high-jinks] are the laziest ________ boys I've ever seen."

Do not for one microsecond assume that I am bored by any of these tales.  On the contrary, Leonard (like Johanna) is one of those friends whose friendship is so replete with his origins that you feel you know them inside out.  It's as if you can imagine them as a whole life friend, instead of merely the one you met as an adult.  Each story puts a piece of a puzzle in place, not that it's a mysterious puzzle...just an entertaining insight into the transparent and entirely visible man he is now.  Was now.

Last Friday, answering his request that his last rites include a cocktail party, some friends and I put one on for him after his memorial service, something we could do to relive his spirit (just fyi, we're good at cocktail parties) as Leonard's life wound into remembrance.  We sipped champagne, one of his drinks, and stared a while at the bottle of Pernod no one seemed to know what to do with, its two aficianados gone from this world.

Stories, however, continued.

In college he rides way up to Michigan for his first year, aspiring to be an architect.  It's cold, it's a long way from home, and architecture school is not what it's cracked up to be.  In a year or two, he settles for Tulane, where his fraternity gets into the kind of trouble he's more used to.

After college, he's married and in the Army, stationed at some point in West Texas and then in the Philippines far from his bride.  It's hot, and all his money goes home, and his unit is doing the sort of job you do in the army when there's nothing else to do, but they find entertainment readily enough.

Later, father of four, he's in the cemetery business, like his father and grandfather, and many years later, visiting New Orleans together, we are taken on a grand tour of the grounds and mausoleum.  It's impressive, the work they've done, and it's clear Leonard is proud of his part in it, despite the mishaps with marble cutters and moving grave sites that make for even more good New Orleans stories, so different and so much more lively than even his father's cultured histories.

When he marries Johanna, they struggle along for a while, but manage to hold tight to each other, and eventually sail up into the North Carolina banks, and us, keeping a wonderful bed and breakfast for years until they build their dream house out in the country, and retire (Leonard:  "Retire!  Hah!")

None of this tells you about the friend he was, or the faithfulness his friendship was, or the man whom the obituary listed as being on every civic-based committee in town...there's that story of how they volunteered to move the cannon from the grave in Boston back to its origins...or vice versa, I forget which.  I'm not the detail person I should be to retell his tales; it's the telling I treasured.

Never mind about that. What I will miss most is those mornings he visited, early to the kitchen counter with his sugared chicory coffee and stories.


4 comments:

  1. Such a beautiful memory to have and to hold in your heart, and now mine. Thank you. Such nice thoughts to begin my day with (while sipping my coffee!)

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  2. I love the way you have retold his stories, Rachel. You've made him seem so real that I wish I had known him.. but it seems he was much like my dad.. such a great storyteller... It was a lovely way to start the morning with my own cup of coffee and memories.

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  3. We would have been kindred spirits over morning coffee and for me, the listening as he might have told me some stories - I wish I could have visited he and Johanna more, but your blog serves me well! Thank you!

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  4. Thank you for the kind words and remembrance of my father. I still enjoy my coffee and chicory, but not the grand amount of sugar and cream he used!!

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