I Remember David
November 15, 2010
1:01 p.m. CST
I don't know what made me think of him today. I hadn't thought about him for almost a year. This morning he flooded my mind. I have many really good memories of David.
David was a young man who lived in another apartment building across the parking lot from mine in the same cul-de-sac. He was 23 or 24 years old, but had the comprehension of a 12 year old boy. When he was very young there had been some sort of accident and he died for several minutes. He was revived, but his mental abilities had been compromised.
There was no one sweeter than David. You couldn't be in the same room with him and not know it. The moment he would see you there, whether he knew you or not, he would run up and say hello and have his hand out front to shake yours. He talked with everybody, no one was off limits. He always had a smile for you. No matter how bad your day was going, David somehow knew how to make you laugh and forget your troubles for a while.
I remember seeing him walking around the neighborhood, but I didn't actually meet him until one day when I was shopping for groceries. He worked as a cashier at the local grocery store. We talked for a couple of minutes while he rang up my groceries and then we went our ways. But after that, every time I came in, he remembered me, and made a point of it to always greet me with "Howdy stranger!" and reach out his hand to take mine.
I kept running into him on the bus when I was going places and when I was waiting for a neighbor girl to come home from school. At the time I was babysitting a 20-some year old downs syndrome woman who had the mind of a 6-year old. David would see me sitting there and he'd sit down with me and chat.
He told me about his love of Hannah Montana and just how much he loved her. Yes, he knew that wasn't her real name. That's the tv-character alter ego of Miley Cyrus. He knew the difference, but used those two names interchangeably, as if she really did have two real names. He admitted that everyone teased him about his love for Hannah Montana. He knew she was only a teenager, and he was a grown adult, but he just couldn't get over how wonderful she was. Hannah Montana was all he could talk about. He told me he had thought about creating a web site in honor of her and had contacted her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, to ask permission for running an official fan site for her. It didn't surprise me that Billy Ray Cyrus didn't answer back. From his end it probably sounded creepy, but there was no way he could possibly know how innocent this boy was.
David showed me pictures of his baby girl. He had been married for a short time to a woman who was also challenged in some way. I never met her, but I did see her on the bus one time with David and the baby. At the time, their baby was only a couple months old. David told me his side of the story, but knowing how people bias their stories in their own favor, and knowing David's slow comprehension, I don't know how much more of the story there is, so I can't say what the whole truth is. In the end, somehow, these two ended up divorced, and David wasn't allowed to see his child much. His version involved his in-laws getting in the way.
David lived for his little girl. He was crazy about her.
One time when I saw him on the bus, we started talking, and he got on his tangent about how much he loved Hannah Montana. I teased him about him having such a crush on her. He got angry and almost yelled at me, "I don't have a crush on her!" Then he hunched over, his whole upper body dropping, almost like he was emotionally defeated, and in a low sad voice said "I just can't live without her." It tickled me to no end. It was almost all I could do to keep from laughing. Trying desperately to hold back the giggles, I told him "Honey, that's the definition of a crush."
Of course, he disagreed.
Several months later, one day on the bus, the bus driver made a point to tell me some bad news. I hadn't seen David in a few days, but sometimes that happens. Sometimes you just don't cross paths with someone, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. But this time, it did. The bus driver gave me the news. There had been an accident. Had I seen it in the newspaper, he wanted to know. I said "No." The driver explained. David had gone to a pool party with some friends in a nearby town and had been swimming. No one was sure what happened. Someone noticed they didn't see David, and looked around. He was floating in the pool, dead. No one knew how he got into the pool or how he drowned.
That day, several people I ran across who knew I knew David, made sure I heard the news. And I passed it along.
Later I looked in the online version of the newspaper and found his obituary. It was the first time I knew his last name, which now I can no longer remember. But I remember the obituary. It talked about the things he liked to do, the places he liked to go. It talked about his mother dying a few years earlier. It talked about how much he loved his daughter, and his relationship with his father. One of the things it talked about was his love of playing guitar. He would go to the nearby restaurant, "Caribou Coffee," and play his guitar. He wasn't very good at it, but he was such a fixture at the restaurant playing his guitar, just for the love of it, and he would run out into the parking lot to greet incoming restaurant patrons, that it didn't matter that he wasn't a guitar star. Everyone adored David.
Somehow in our conversations, I never knew David played there. I never knew he like to play guitar at all. I had never been inside Caribou Coffee. I wish I had. He treated everything with enthusiasm. He loved people with enthusiasm. Even if his playing was the worst on earth, it would have been worth it to go there and hear him play and sing along, just to witness that joy and enthusiasm he brought to everything he did. And I wouldn't have laughed. Well, maybe with him, but not at him.
For those who have never met David or someone like him, I feel sorry for them. Everyone should know someone like David. When I think of him, I don't cry. I'm sorry he's dead, but when I think of him, all I feel is joy. He left me with that.
