Hero Among Us
When I was a boy, I was in awe of Tony. He was strong, athletic, tough, and confident. He was everything that I wanted to be but was not. Although he was nine years my older brother, he would still talk to me genuinely. I thought because I could make him laugh. Tony would mess with me, he challenged just about everyone, but he never made me feel like less. Even way back then, there was a distance in his eyes, maybe loneliness, that I could not understand.
Tony was constantly questioning in conversation, oftentimes for humor, but sometimes seriously. One day he was driving me somewhere and out of the blue he asked me if I had a soul.
“Yes” I said.
He questioned again: “How do you know?”
I thought awhile, then answered: “Because I can feel it.”
Tony seemed surprised, then he truly smiled. He smiled with his eyes. And there was no loneliness in our car. It seemed like an obvious response to me at the time, but it had a wonderful effect. Thereafter, he was willing to exchange ideas with me. Tony made me feel exceptional even when the rest of the world did not.
So, as I grew older I came to know my brother from a broader perspective. He was a man of pride and feeling, although he would often conceal it. The people he liked made him laugh, the people he admired were honest and direct. I also watched the disease of alcoholism gnaw away at his strength, and was no help to him.
Tony and I were driving home from our folks’ farm on Bullfrog Rd after Thanksgiving dinner, less than four months prior to his death. We listened in rapt silence to The Emperor concerto from Ludwig van Beethoven. Neither of us had much of an ear for music, much less classical, but on this night the muses found us somehow. Afterwards, he told me that what he wanted most from his life was to be a hero, a hero in the classical Greek sense of arete. Tony was a proud and idealistic man.
My brother was many things, but humble was not near the top of that list. For folks like Tony, the insidious nature of alcoholism, the unfairness of it, is devastating. It literally consumed him mentally, spiritually, and physically. Given his powerful pride and his idealism, the disease seemed to compound his strange sense of isolation. Ultimately, the addiction overwhelmed his life and then caused the end of it. Tony often felt that his image and his station were of some importance. He did not seem to understand that all his family wanted was his love.
Long ago, Tony had carved his name into the concrete that made up the walkway outside of our family home on Holmhurst Rd. My brother Patrick and his wife Julie ended up buying the property from our parents and continued the family tradition. So it was that Tony had entrusted our nephew PJ, who was still a very young lad at that time, with the safekeeping of his monument. Just a few days before Tony’s final day, Julie found his business card, a dollar bill, and a note on the kitchen table. It read: “Keep up the good work.”
Losing Anthony King saddened all of us beyond words, and that sense of emptiness still lingers, but this story always gives me great joy. A small thing so typical of him. I know now that Tony is unencumbered by the shackles of a conditioned mind and a dependent body. He visits my dreams. I believe that he realizes what he could not with us, that a hero is a man who serves the ones, especially the little ones, who the rest of us often ignore.