Gus

It's another rainy Monday. I enter the bar and the only bar "customers" are Terry's kids, Ryan and Shannon. Terry is clocking out and Bridgette is clocking in. I order food and drink, and I watch Bridgette interact with the kids. She's really good with the little ones. After a while Amy, my acquaintance from the previous rainy Monday, comes in and sits beside me. We talk and drink, and drink and talk, and time goes by.

Suddenly Bridgette says, "You know Gus died, don't you?"

"Gus is dead?" I ask, mildly astonished. I saw him here at the bar just a few weeks ago. I can hardly believe that he's dead.

Gus was a regular bar customer who always carried a bag of hard candy with him. When he came into the bar he would spread a few dozen pieces of candy on the bar and invite everyone around him to have some. Though I saw him at the bar many times, I knew him only as a "regular".

"How did he die?" I ask.

"He died in his sleep," Bridgette replies. Gus had health problems and always used crutches or a wheelchair to get around. I didn't know that any of his problems was serious enough to kill him.

"I went to his memorial service on Wednesday," Bridgette says. "He was 48."

Forty eight. That's young. Too young to die in your sleep. I guess his mission on earth was finished. He had learned, or failed to learn, from the lessons he had taken on. I didn't know him, didn't know if he had family or friends. It seemed to me he slipped away with barely a ripple.

Amy and I resumed our conversation. No one talked about Gus anymore. But when I left, I thought about Gus, and his death, and I thought about death in general, and life in general, and my life, and the meaning of my life. And I wondered if one day my memorial would be spoken by a bartender, "Did you hear about Wayne?"