Hanley

When I was a boy I had a neighbor whose name was Hanley. I liked Hanley, and I still think of him often even though he’s been dead more than 25 years. He fell asleep with a cigarette and burnt up in bed. He was a good man, though many in the world may not have considered him such. He spoke in a deep, rich, sonorous voice. Sometimes he called me Tommy, but mostly he simply called me boy.

The reason the world may have looked askance at Hanley was because he was addicted to alcohol. We’d sleep out in the tent under the apple tree in the summer, and we’d wait for Hanley to come up the back alley from the First and Last Chance. We’d greet him, but at those times he often didn’t speak. He’d be drunk and staggering.

On many occasions I went to his house in the morning. He lived with his elderly mother who would pour Hanley his cups of strong coffee before he went to work at the light plant. His mother would smile broadly at me with her teeth out. Hanley would be unshaven and groggy, but it would be obvious that he was pleased that I had come in. Somehow I found their company warm and pleasant.

I know that alcoholism is a dreadful thing, and I don’t dismiss it in Hanley’s case. He died because he was an alcoholic. Being just a neighbor kid, I was spared the probable terrible ramifications of Hanley’s malady. As it was, I liked Hanley, and he liked me. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and I remember the tar stains on his fingertips. He was a raw-boned fellow and tall, with a weathered face and long hands.

My friendship with Hanley was by no means deep. There was enough distance between us that I took the news of his death with shock, but not with grief. I don’t want to sound cold, but the shock I felt was not disbelief, more the quality one experiences when stark reality sets in. Hanley’s end was not unexpected in our environs. Folks said well, they were shocked but not surprised, seeing how he was, seeing how he drank.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever had any kind of relationship with Hanley. Perhaps it was because I was a child. A child will go in where adults fear to tread. I never saw an adult neighbor at Hanley’s house at 7:30 in the morning, people who just stopped in early for no particular reason. Kids do that, but adults don’t. Trusting children take people as they come, without preconditions.

I read the 13th chapter of First Corinthians today, St. Paul’s great teaching about love; and I prayed that the Lord would teach me to love. After I read the Scripture, I was a bit apprehensive, wondering if I would ever understand love in my time. In my mind, I saw Jesus on the cross and I knew that was love, but I don’t pretend to fully comprehend it.

I ask myself if I loved Hanley, and I think maybe I did. I don’t know what else to call it. Now that I’m old and crotchety, I don’t have relationships with people like I had with him. I have a tendency to judge. I’m forever imputing motives, second-guessing, suspecting, finding fault, making sure I find a shortcoming or two. In Hanley’s case, I never did do those things. I didn’t condemn him, didn’t think to condemn him. Even when he staggered up the back alley, I actually looked forward to seeing him. In my child’s mind, I’m sure I chuckled and probably said, boy he’s really staggering tonight. But I didn’t think that was good or bad or what an awful man Hanley was for being so drunk. He was just Hanley. I accepted him with no reservations, no expectations that he should change. He did not, in fact, ever change.

For sure, love is more complicated than the love I had for Hanley. Jesus’ love for me and Hanley is indeed infinite compared to the simple, detached friendship a man and a neighbor kid shared so long ago. Nevertheless, there was something there, a beginning perhaps, a place for greater love to begin.

It would be easy for me to take my adult perceptions back to those mornings in Hanley’s kitchen and recast them with all kinds of judgments. Rather, I prefer to bring those mornings into now and again smell the strong coffee on the gas burner, hear Hanley’s gentle bass voice say how you doin’, boy. There is no ego in the air, no condemnation – just acceptance. Maybe it takes a child’s eyes to see the beauty and good and sweetness in a broken man. Love is more than the love I had for Hanley; but simple as it was, it was greater than prophecies and tongues and knowledge… and has endured. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 3rd, 1987