Louis

 It's been a week a little over a week two weeks since my friend Louis died. I've tried to write about him several times...and what I wrote seemed too paltry to put into the world. Seemed too paltry to serve as any kind of tribute to a man I loved so dearly, who had been such an important part of my life.

And although I didn't think it consciously, I realized yesterday that I had quietly resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to write anything. Because I didn't have the words to do justice to my friend.

But then it hit me. There wasn't going to be a memorial service for Louis. He had taught thousands of students over the course of his career as a high school teacher, but all of the grieving for him was going to be solitary.

So I knew that I had to try to say something. Even if only a few people were out there to hear it.

So I'm going to tell about the last picture that I have of him and me together.

We're standing outside of his church, King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church. Pre-pandemic. I'd gone to visit his church, along with two of my other dearest friends. I think this was the first time I'd ever been more dressed up than Louis. At school, he always wore a suit. Which is one of the reasons why I started wearing a suit when I taught. After the picture was taken, Louis told me and my friends that we should probably leave after the offertory, because the service was pretty long. I was in the midst of My Church Year--I had resolved to visit every Archdiocesan Catholic Church in Louisville--and it wasn't uncommon for me to go to two church services in a day, so I was feeling a little smug about that: of course I could handle a long service. An hour and a half later the offering was taken up, and my friends and I hit the door. Louis laughed when we talked about it afterwards, and when I asked him how much longer it went after we'd left, he said just a couple of hours or so. He loved that church. Spent a lot of his retirement hours there...even after the pandemic had closed the world down.

But Louis always kept it real. And he always had my back.

I'm thinking about how he would talk about growing up in the South, and having to miss school to go out into the fields to pick cotton. I'm thinking about him asking me to write a recommendation for him when he applied for the Kentucky Teacher of the Year award, and how he won that award. There are a lot of miles between that cotton field and the State Teacher of the Year award. I don't think there are very many people who could walk those miles.

And I'm thinking about how once Louis was talking about the old "Forty Acres and a Mule" promise that been broken so long ago, and Louis dismissed it by saying, "What do I want with some damn mule? Where would I put it? On my balcony?" It's hard for me not to hear echoes of Cedric the Entertainer in Barbershop when I remember that.

And then I just run out of words. Well, no, I get choked on my words. I miss Louis, and talking about him is just really painful right now. So I wrote a song for him. I'm sorry that it's not a better song, but it's the best that I had in me for now. 

I miss you, Brother Louis. I thought we had more time.

https://phonynoam.tumblr.com/post/646469704659140608/rip-louis-bryant-your-memory-is-a-blessing