How do you capture the essence of who a person is with words? How do you communicate the influence someone has had on you with groups of made up symbols that fall short of internal feelings? I want to describe Jimmy Lee to you not just to share him but so that I’m sure to remember him. Let me tell you what he looks like: He is a fifty year old black man who works as a truck driver, an oyster shucker, and works some odd job at a fishery or maybe he just drives trucks for the fishery. He likes to color coordinate his clothing although he never looks over coordinated or wears obviously expensive clothing. His head always wears one of his fifteen ball caps and his nose always holds a pair of black rectangular rimmed glasses. He is probably between 5-6 and 5-9 and weights about 200lbs. When he speaks his accent reveals him to be of the south and seemingly places him as a country man. I suppose I can also tell you some of the things he does or has done. He was married to a woman in Macon, GA which didn’t work out, and used to go to church quite regularly. Now he works 2-3 jobs and brings a cooler full of beer to work Friday and Saturday nights so he and his coworkers can stand around in the parking lot drinking beer while they’re being eaten by mosquitos. He doesn’t drink and drive and he has never hit on me although he frequently gives some of the waitresses a teasingly hard time. This man is really as sweet as can be. According to him I drive too fast and am going to lose my drivers license because of it. ( I do not drive too fast. I go by the speed limit.) Jimmy Lee and I have an ongoing joke that when I lose my license that he will drive up to ATL with his lawyer and come get me. It is silly, but cute.
In more ways than one Jimmy has communicated that he is really proud of me for going to college and taking advantage of the opportunity to do well and go far in life. I, being my lovely self, reminded him that plenty of people graduating college without jobs just after he was saying that I would do well and get a good job and ect. He just brushed my negative comment off. I’m not sure if it is the poor culture I grew up in that associates such a positive stigma to education, believing that if you can somehow afford to go to college and you’re smart enough to do well that you will get a good job and have an easy life. I don’t know why, but Jimmy wants that for be so badly. Tonight he even gave me a lecture saying, “I’m not trying to play daddy,” but work hard, have fun, don’t settle for the first guy that comes along, and sure as hell don’t get pregnant. Once that happens, he said, all your traveling and fun and opportunities will end and you will be stuck in Gulf Shores for the rest of your life.
It was so important to Jimmy Lee to help me on this endeavor, to give me something to remember him by, and just to keep me safe that he asked me to lend him the favor of buying me a tank of gas. I told him he didn’t have to, but if that was so important to him I wouldn’t stop him. He replied it was terribly important and handed me a fifty dollar bill.
That man really treated me with love.
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