The Apology I Never Got to Give
There's a man I grew up next door to named Gerald. He wasn't flashy or remarkable in any way that the world tends to notice. He fixed lawnmowers in his garage on Saturday mornings, drank sweet tea on his porch in the afternoons, and called everybody "buddy" whether he'd known you thirty years or thirty seconds.
I was sixteen when I decided Gerald was boring.
That's the specific cruelty of being sixteen. You look at a quiet man living a quiet life and you file him away as someone who never amounted to anything. I'd breeze past him on my way to somewhere more important, giving him the half-wave that teenagers reserve for people they've already dismissed. He'd always wave back like it was a full conversation.
I moved away at eighteen and didn't think much about Gerald for a long time.
It was my mother who told me he'd passed. This was maybe ten years later. She mentioned it the way you mention things that happened while someone was away — matter-of-factly, with a slight apology in her voice, as if she was sorry the world kept moving without me in it. Gerald had died of a heart attack. He was sixty-two. His wife, Donna, had sold the house and moved to be closer to her daughter in Tennessee.
I remember sitting with that news for a minute and feeling something I didn't have a word for yet.
What I know now, and what I couldn't have understood at sixteen, is that Gerald was doing something genuinely hard. He had lost a son before I ever knew him — a boy who died young, before I was born, before we moved in next door. My mother told me that too, years later, like she was handing me the missing piece of a puzzle I hadn't known I was working on. Gerald had carried that weight every single day I watched him fix lawnmowers and wave at me from his porch. He was not boring. He was surviving. He was, in his own quiet way, thriving against something enormous.
I think about him now when I find myself dismissing people too quickly. When I catch myself measuring someone's worth by the noise they make or the space they take up. That's a habit I got from being young and stupid and have been trying to unlearn ever since.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh has a lot of apologies he'll never get to deliver. Gerald's is near the top of that list. Not because anything dramatic happened between us, but because the dismissal itself was the wound — casual, thoughtless, and completely one-sided. He never knew. Which somehow makes it heavier, not lighter.
If I could sit with him on that porch now, I'd ask him about his son. I'd ask what he was thinking about on those Saturday mornings. I'd let the silence be comfortable instead of something to escape.
I'd wave back like it mattered.
Because it does. It always did.
More personal writing at scottandrewalpaugh.com and andrewalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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