Lawton

Lawton

For years I had periodically resolved to do a Google search on my former colleague and friend, Lawton, or take a chance on calling the phone number I had for him from a very long time ago.

Lawton and I and a mutual friend had spent many evenings at the office he managed while he worked long after all the other personnel had gone home, until one or other of the three would decide it was time to find something to eat. That usually meant driving to the pizza parlor where we had become regular customers.

I have no idea why, last Sunday, on a lugubrious, wet, gray Fall afternoon, just another like so many at this time of year, I actually typed his name into my browser. I would like to think that it was some conjunction of prescience and nostalgia stripping away the accumulation of excuses and procrastination with which I had covered up my negligence, just like the strong wind that at that moment was tearing all the red, gold and brown leaves off the trees. But I know it was sheer coincidence.

Lawton had passed away barely a month earlier.

His obituary remarked that he had never missed a day’s work in forty-seven years, that he was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, that he always made those around him happy. It listed his many talents and the numerous community activities and groups that he led or participated in.

The grief and gloom descending as I read on was suddenly replaced by a triumphant pride as I read that four years before his passing, the city had renamed the school where he had managed the office for fifty years, for him. That was no perfunctory honor. That school Board has a strict policy of naming its schools only for the Founding Fathers of the nation. This is the only exception it has made in its almost 90 years of existence.

It was so fitting, for Lawton was an exceptional man.