A World Diminished

It sits just off the highway a few miles from the turnoff to our farm, a squat, unremarkable building in the middle of a blacktopped lot, two gas pumps out front. Two donkeys live in a corral adjacent to the building, and customers sometimes saunter over and offer treats to the pair. It’s the Market, and for almost four decades, Danny owned and ran the place.

Danny’s market was one of the first places we patronized when we bought our place years ago. From the get-go, he was a genial shopkeeper, helpful and gregarious. In addition to groceries, cigarettes, beer and whatnot, the market stocks a large variety of useful things like fuses, hose clamps, tire patching kits, battery clamps and cables, hand siphons, gas cans, funnels, bb’s, scratch feed for chickens, propane tanks, fishing line & lures, and pocket knives. It’s a rural masterpiece of the psychology behind the impulse-buy.

A few weeks ago, we noticed that Danny’s market was closed. This caused my wife and me to speculate about what might be the matter, because Danny stayed open even on Christmas Day for a half day. One day, a sign was taped to the glass door. We pulled into the lot and read the sign: “Closed due to sickness. Sorry!”

When Danny’s finally reopened a couple of weeks later, I stopped in and chatted with Danny’s wife. She confirmed what I had suspected, which was that Danny had tested positive for the Kung Flu or the China Virus or the Chinese Coff or whatever those who remain unimpressed with Fauci are calling it now. He had been hospitalized due to some respiratory distress but recovered and was discharged home. The day I stopped in, Danny was in the store, but was in the back, working on bills and paperwork. I decided not to poke my head in and pester him, so I left. A few days later, the store was closed again. This time, there was a white wreath on the door, and a new sign. “Closed due to Danny’s death. Sorry.”

Danny was great fun to tease. He and I held similar political beliefs, and I used to enjoy stopping in and telling him that I was doing some fundraising for Slow Joe Biden, or for the BLM crowd. I really had him going once when I told him that I’d donated money to the Legitimate BBQ convention. He stared at me and repeated “legitimate barbecue” a few times in a whisper, then his eyes widened and he started yelling at me. “That’s that damn lgbqt stuff, ain’t it? Ain’t it?”

Danny liked to talk more than politics. He loved hunting and fishing, and we used to try to best each other in predicting the weather for the next day. He loved the donkeys out back and doted on them with marshmallows and granola bars. He told me that he’d once gone to a disco in Knoxville back in the Seventies and that he felt that he’d missed his calling. “Still got that leisure suit,” he grinned.

He was also a kind and helpful soul. Once, during a terrible snowstorm, my wife stopped at the market enroute to home (I was at work) and she was afraid to try to make it to the farm in almost whiteout conditions with nearly a foot of snow on the road. Danny got two deputy sheriffs to take her home, one of them driving the car and the other following in their cruiser. Just a Danny thing to do.

And now he’s gone. It’s too soon to ask his family about what happened. I have some suspicions; perhaps they will go unaddressed. I wonder if his family will keep the market open, or if it will be yet one more small business in a small mountain community that goes under and disappears. I will miss Danny. He was a real presence. Judging from the crowd outside the funeral home when I drove past yesterday, he was greatly loved in the community.

I wish I’d ducked into his office that day in the store just to say hello. We miss the opportunities we don’t recognize as opportunities.

We are praying for Danny’s widow and the rest of his family, that their grief may be eased, and that they will be reunited with him someday.

My world is very small, intentionally so. And tonight, thinking of Danny and his easy manner, my world feels diminished.

In pace requiescat, Danny. You are missed, my friend.

~ S.K. Orr