What I Could Never Just Say (for Arthur C. Neal, Jr.)

Arthur C. Neal, Jr. (May 5, 1935 -2008)  



What I Could Never Just Say (for Arthur C. Neal, Jr.)by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
So it’s that time of the year again, Old Man--that three day-period in May when you, Frank Paul, Sr. and Willie Mays all celebrate birthdays. I still remember that May afternoon in 1972--a week after your 37th birthday and a few days after Mays had been traded to The Mets--when Mays hit that homer in his first game as a Met.  We watched many games that summer, and even more still the following summer when the Mets went to the Series.  I had almost imagined that we’d spend these years -- the now years -- watching games at Durham Bulls Park, which is simply the best place in America to watch a game; you would have loved it.
Tearing up a bit thinking about what might have been, but that’s only because I know what was.  
I now know that those first games you took me to at Yankee Stadium had more to do with with the fact that it was  a short bus ride--and even a walk--down 168th Street (beneath the El), to Webster Avenue, and then the right on 161st Street, across the Grand Concourse--on a warm summer day; A trip to Shea would mean a bus and two trains, both time and money that you didn’t necessarily have.
I guess more than anything, what I lament is that there was not more time.  I never begrudged your 10-hour, 6-days-a-week, BX-BK grind, because when you were home -- those Sundays of grits, runny eggs, buttered-oven-toast, baseball, The Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Jimmy McGriff--you were home.
I suspect your grand-daughters do not begrudge that which I learned from you; both the passion and the joy of the work itself, and the discipline and time that it demanded; they both take a piece of that with them.  Your oldest granddaughter is lean and long as you were; your youngest is as hearty and mischievous as you were -- you would have sat at the kitchen table, drank-coffee and talked shop with the oldest and would have gleefully watched Scooby-Doo with the youngest.
And I get that this is more formal of an address that our sharing of the physical plane ever allowed. We both know that the Woman that we shared--my Mother and your Wife--took up quite a bit of bandwidth; there were few words for us to get in.  Your music did your talking, as we listened to grown men talk, sing, and play about God, religion, love desired, love lost -- redemption, forgiveness and responsibility -- all the things you came to embody for me, even in your silence.
At 50, I am the age you were, when you were most hopeful.  Hope was a relative thing for a grown man, born and raised in a South, more desperate than dirty, who came to the big city as young man, which no definable skills except the ability to put in a hard day’s work, a tenth-grade education, and your integrity.  You came to New York at the behest of your Sister -- my Aunt Virginia -- who like so many of your siblings settled in the Bronx; she introduced you to my Mother.  
You were only two-years older than I am now, when Aunt Virginia succumbed to cancer.  I recall her homegoing -- literally in the same place where I would say goodbye to you twenty-one-years later -- because it was the first time I saw you cry; your fragility disrupted me, if only because it reminded me, perhaps for the first time, that the losses were inevitable; my own stoicism in response to death, the byproduct of that moment.
Less than a decade after Aunt Virginia’s death you would be robbed of your own physical strength, beginning your slow decline in the face of MS.  Those drives back to Augusta that I once imagined, those box-seats at Shea or even Yankee stadium, a brunch on the deck in your son and daughter-in-law’s home, in the very South that you had left in the 1950s were not to be possible.  Your granddaughters would never get to see you dance; your youngest granddaughter would never see you walk.  What disrupted me in those days was your lack of complaint.
I write these words today, because, like  you and your music, it’s the way I speak. And though I came to understand that these are words that you could have never read -- learning to read being a luxury for a Black boy raised in an era for which Jim Crow was not a metaphor -- but alas my last lament, that I never took the time to read to you, what I have told the world with my words  so often:  That I am the man I am because of You, that your love of our music, our culture and our family, made me love the same, and it has provided for me and your family in ways that were/are unimaginable to you; that I love you for simply being the man that you were/are.