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“Mister StandStill” appeared one day, across the street from my dad’s restaurant, right in front of the “Town & Country” grocery store. He wore an old fashioned, dark blue men’s hat and dressed a little nicer than the average person in the neighborhood. I never saw him arrive or leave. He was just there. Standing. And he stood there, every day, for years.

What was particularly eerie about Mr. StandStill was that he faced our restaurant when he stood. When I sat at table #6 and did my homework (when there were no customers), he was facing me. His face was not sad. It was blank, expressionless, checked-out. I would look down to do some Algebra and when I looked up, he would be there, across the street, standing and staring blankly. I tried to keep my focus on the Algebra.

“Look Slim, there go Mr. StandStill”, Charles would point out, gestering his arms toward the corner where Mr. Standstill was parked, motionless. Charles Anderson was the ‘cook’ I spent most of my evenings with during my teenage years at the restaurant. “What’s he thinking, Slim? ‘Here I am…standing…I’m gonna stand right here…all day’. What’s wrong with him, Slim?”

I wondered that myself. I felt sorry for him, especially when it rained. One summer when it was particularly hot, rain would have been a blessing. He was drenched with sweat and looked terrible. Nobody was standing in the sun that day, except Mr. Standstill.

As if he couldn’t bear to watch any longer, my dad finally walked across the street and handed Mr. StandStill a giant glass of iced tea. That was the only time anyone ever heard him speak. He looked at my dad and said, “Thank you.”

And one day, just like he had arrived, he was gone. No one really knew why Mr. Standstill stood at the corner of East Chester and Cartmell street. There were rumors, but we all assumed something bad had happened. Something made him drop his basket. My brother heard that he had walked into his house one day to discover his wife and daughter had been murdered. That would certainly cause someone to just stop, and stare. Peace be with you Mister Standstill.

I never got too close to Mrs. Campbell’s bees. That was one warning I did not question. And I wasn’t necessarily afraid of honeybees, it was Mrs. Campbell and her honeybees that were so eerie to me. I remember her drifting in and out of the hives with the veil of her beekeeping hat covering her face. I was scared of that scene.

The Campbell’s lived at the end lot of Moundview Drive, just before it hooked and turned into Desha. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with Mrs. Campbell. Her son Tony was a couple of years older than me, and he “made straight A’s” in school. But he rarely left his yard. He didn’t ever once even come close to playing a football game with Terry or Philip, my brother Paul or me.

Terry liked to mess with Tony when he had the chance. One day he asked him, “Hey Tony, how far is it from the earth to the sun?” Tony looked toward the sun, covering his gaze with his raised hand, “it’s about 93 million miles away.”
Terry would keep a straight face until we got out of hearing range. (That wasn’t very long because Tony didn’t stray from a tight perimeter around his yard.) Then he would bust out laughing, “Did you see him squint and look at the sun?! What a dumb-ass!” Terry loved to mess with people but he didn’t tamper with the bee hives either.

My relationship with most stinging, flying insects during my childhood was mainly “seek and destroy”. When we threw stones at giant wasp nests, or shot them with a b.b. gun, it hardly occurred to us how fast wasps can fly and how far they would follow. In my neighborhood, you had to run to survive. Sometimes there was no warning before someone smacked a wasp nest. You just knew to run when they ran.

Somehow we knew that honeybees were “good”, at least to like to think that I thought that way. There were those days in Little League practice when Cairy Craig taught us how to catch bees by pinching their wings behind their back. We would force them to sting our shirts or a leather glove, and then pinch off a wing. The bee was still alive but couldn’t fly or sting. It would just crawl. When one had a number of bees crawling all over one’s arm, it was quite terrifying to some of the other Little League players. Boys do strange things.

Otherwise, honeybees were held in the highest regard. As someone who will scoop up worms from the sidewalk after a rainy day and toss them back to the soil, I can’t imagine harming a honeybee. But after my first year of being a “remote” beekeeper, I have grown to understand that honeybees themselves can be quite cruel to other honeybees. Drone bees are starved and kicked out of the hive when the weather turns cold, for instance.

The truth of it is, I picked up the bees and drove with them in my trunk to Tennessee where my dad had some empty hives waiting. He hung the queen, poured the bees over her and shut the lid. It was an amazing process. But I missed most of the fun stuff. I have only met them 2 or 3 times. There is a lot to learn about taking care of these creatures. And my dad keeps learning. It’s a good thing Mrs. Campbell is not too far away.

Robert Woods was best described as the “town drunk”. He was a small man, about 5′4″, and no more than 120 lbs. His erratic, poofy afro was grey on the sides and his facial hair was always in various stages of growth. His skin was shoe polish black.

I knew Robert because he was frequently at my dad’s BBQ restaurant. My dad owned a 13 table restaurant in a small West Tennessee town, across the street from a seemingly ancient Town & Country grocery store. The grocery store was at the corner of a ’strip’ next to the hairdresser, pharmacy, “dime store” and church - all housed under a common roof. Detached from the strip and little further off the street was a tiny, cinder block beer hall with one pool table and a “real” slot machine in the back.

Next door to the restaurant on the eastern side was a car wash and laundry mat; on the western side, a steel warehouse. We were at the southeast corner of a 4 way red light. Diagonal to us was a gas station adjacent to Big Al’s liquor store.

Don’t be fooled. There were several factories within 1 mile of the restaurant, including a massive Procter & Gamble - so the restaurant did quite well. The neighborhood was mixed, at least overtly. Three blocks away, just northwest of the gas station was a government housing community we knew as “the projects”. Robert Woods stumbled out of there, somewhere, and kept it real with me for all the years I spent cooking and serving at the South’s Finest BBQ restaurant.

If you have never waited tables, you wouldn’t know the expression, “in the weeds”. Maybe you would. But the rush of serving dozens of people, simultaneously, in a concise, regimented time frame - there’s nothing like the anxiety of a hungry person. And if things don’t go right, and on time, hungry people can be very unpolite.

Robert Woods was sitting at table #13 when I was in the weeds one day, smoking a cigarette through his missing front teeth, laughing his ass off. As usual, he was giddy drunk and nothing entertained him more than me running around, frantically, while burly factory workers waited anxiously for their food, tea, coffee, side of beans, coffee creamer or their pack of matches. Every time I passed by he would let out with, “It’ll come to ya…heh-heh…it’ll sho come to ya alright!” Asshole.

I almost punched him one day when I was 16. I was an All State football player and he was a skinny, semi-homeless man that was certainly drunk at the time. But I didn’t do it. If I did, he would have probably scratched my eyes out. But my dad would have pulverized him and he knew it. So he just looked at me and said, “Hmmph! It’s gonna come to ya”.

No one ever touched me at the restaurant. Never. My dad was about 5′ 7″” tall with the forearms of Popeye. No one messed with him. One jerk stood up in my face one evening and, within 2 seconds, my dad came from the kitchen, grabbed the man, and tossed him like a cabbage patch doll against the dining room wall. I have never seen anyone move so quickly to get out the door. When Robert heard about it he would say, “It came to him!”

Robert Woods did odd jobs for my dad when he was sober, which was not often. There always seemed to be an issue with the plumbing and Robert was the man who worked “the snake”. He chopped wood sometimes, did some painting, carpentry and light cleaning. Of course my dad usually did most of the work after the first hour or so. If they didn’t get finished by 10:00 am, Robert would be too drunk to do anymore. It was a vicious cycle. Ultimately, my dad took care of him and kept him fed.

My dad always fed a lot of people “under the table”. No one really ever knew but him. He kept it from my brothers and me, or so I imagine. He didn’t want us feeding our friends. He wasn’t the softest person in the world, but he took care of the poorest among us. And he still does.

Robert drank hard liquor. He loved whiskey. He wasn’t a bad man either; he was just human. Humans turn into assholes when they drink whiskey. I always thought Robert was an asshole and he made me nervous. I never knew what to expect from him. But he always ended any discourse with, “It will come to you”, in his own special, raspy way. So far, he’s been right.

I really never knew why my dad tolerated Robert. Sometimes I think he didn’t have a choice. He came with the territory. But somehow he was needed. He was the asterisk, the pimple, the laughter in a rainstorm and he always gave me a little ’spark’ when I saw him, even if it was a nervous spark. There was only the present when Robert was around.

He could be pleasant, “they call me ‘Country’ - the ‘Country Gentleman’!”, he would declare, “heeehhhee…” Robert spoke a different language, had a different set of rules. When everyone was taking themselves too seriously, Robert would be laughing. “It’ll sho come to ya alright!” He had a poignant delivery.

Once I moved away and went to college, I didn’t see much of Robert. I didn’t ever stick around very long once I left. Robert kept getting sick. He had an ulcer. Finally he had surgery. The doctor told him he couldn’t drink anymore.

But he told my dad he was ok to drink and he was determined to give it a try. “If you drink, Robert, I can’t see you again. It’s going to kill you and I’m not going to watch”, my dad told him. Robert was dead 2 days later. Dad said he “still had that stuck-up look on his face”, even in the casket.

I miss Robert.

My wife works in pediatric oncology. Day in and day out she works with children who have cancer and all the complications that come with that horrible disease. The amazing thing is that, instead of being depressed, she is inspired by these children and finds great joy in working with them. Sometimes it’s very hard to hear about her work day. And some days I’m amazed at what happens.

Recently there was one particular child who became very special to many of the hospital staff. He was wise, loving and very very sick. He was always telling my wife, “you worry too much”. And he was usually the one comforting his family about his condition. A gem of a person and an inspiration to many - but he was not destined to live long.

I consider myself a “recovering Southern Baptist” in that I was raised in a fire and brimstone style church in rural West Tennessee. So I have little acceptance of an afterlife where roads are paved with gold and the lion lies with the lamb. Personally, dirt is easier on the feet and lions would be ridiculous vegetarians. But I was inspired by what this child said and “saw” as he left this life.

Just before he died, he was speaking with his grandmother and said, “I’m dying grandma. But it’s ok. My friends are here.” To which the grandmother replied, “What friends? Your friends from school or the kids from the hospital?”

“No grandma, I’m talking about my new friends - and they’re so beautiful!” And then he died.