Sam

As I'm getting older, I feel that many of my childhood memories are condensing, and fine details I could recall easily just a few years ago are breaking off into smaller pieces and creating this mosaic of my life.

One thing I still remember quite clearly is this iconic figure that drifted into my life as a little kid, and just as quickly, vanished. I used to know him as Sam.

Sam was like a cartoon character. You could always rely on him to never change. Just like a cartoon character, every time you'd see him, he'd be wearing the same thing, and acting the same way you saw him last.

Sam was a contractor my dad befriended around the time our house was built in the late 1980's. Reeking of tobacco, he had ruggedness of John Wayne if he had been through a meat grinder with an impenetrable dome of slicked black silvery hair. If this was a product of not showering, or some sort of gel or cream, I'll never know. It seemed if every time I saw him he wore one of those cheapo teamster style jackets. Sam drove a black pickup truck with a white tool box fixed behind the cab's back window. (From this point on, I've judged every pickup if it had a tool box behind the cab or not. Even at the age of three, I had standards.) I remember him being very stoic. When he talked with that gravelly voice, you listened. It was like he had the knowledge of living a hundred previous lives before he found himself in the suburbs in the late 1900's.

I can remember riding in that pickup truck, sandwiched between Sam and my father, and on occasion, my little brother, crusing through Hickory Hollow. What strikes me most vividly is the beer cans and crushed up Marlboro boxes sliding back and forth across the dashboard. This was normal.

The relationship I had with him paled in comparison to the one he had with my father. They were the Lennon and McCartney of construction - both had radically different personalities, but had some connection that seemed to click.

Looking at photographs of the two standing next to each other, it's hard to imagine that they ever became friends. Sam was this sixty-something grizzled old man with grown children and a storied past while Kevin Hilliard was a thirtysomething businessman who was moving to the suburbs with his wife and two young children. What they had in common was easy to figure out: they both liked to build shit. I could expect to see Sam's black pickup truck come down our driveway when my dad started one of his 'projects'.

Just as curiously as he drifted into my life, he drifted out of it.

Sam died on May 7, 1995 of a heart attack.

When my parents told me the next morning, I couldn't believe it. My dad was quivering. I had never seen him so upset before. It was such a hard pill to swallow. I couldn't really imagine Sam not being around anymore. He was ever-present, someone you could depend on to be there.

When a "Sam story" comes up, the mood seems to shift with a tinge of sadness. Every "Sam story" ends the same way. The quiver in his voice returns and the same, sincere line always follows:

"Sam was my buddy. I miss him."