Down The Street

 We're gonna need some more Broncos fans.

Our friend and neighbor Nick passed on this week. He was the old guy on the block. His house was on the corner, and he saw his share of good, bad and ugly during his time there. When the neighborhood lit up for Fourth of July celebrations, he had a front row seat. Just like when cars would choose the intersection to spin donuts and leave great heaps of smoking rubber, he got to experience all that noise and stink.

Such was the life of the guy who lived on the corner. Nick was there for an awful long time. He was there long before we moved in twenty-six years ago. His front yard was a haphazard lot of barrels, wood and metal, car parts, and a great many trees, most of which were shorter than the haphazard but sturdy fence he built to go around it. Somewhere in there I'm pretty sure I saw an old streetlight.

His front steps were covered in plastic, as if waiting for a chance to paint, or waiting for a chance for paint to dry. I assumed he made his entrance and egress from the side door beneath the car port. The car port that occasionally played host to vehicles like a cherry red Buick that he had restored once upon a time, but spent most of the time under a cover when it wasn't on its way to a vintage car show, and a twenty-five foot Winnebago for which he had to raise the roof to wedge it in. 

Nick would show up to the yearly Neighborhood Night Out, sticking around long enough to tag off on all of us who live down the street and then back up the driveway he went. I would periodically run into him on my daily runs around the block, and somewhere along the line a long time ago the subject of professional football came up. His distaste for the then local franchise, The Raiders, was quickly in evidence, and I was surprised to hear that his favorite team happened to be The Broncos. 

Just like me. 

And so, for years we kept tabs on "our team." When we won a Super Bowl. When we lost a Super Bowl. When we made the playoffs. When we missed the playoffs. "What happened to our team?" Nick would ask me as I rounded that corner. I would stop and commiserate about how things were going that season, or our hopes for the next. We knew that our political views were not completely in alignment, so we steered clear of most of that, preferring to vent our pleasures and displeasures in a pigskin vein. 

On Thursday morning, we got a text from another one of our neighbors letting us know that Nick had gone to that big carport in the sky. While he was here, Nick held his corner down. He was a fixture, and he stomped on that corner of the Terra. He will be missed. 

Go Broncos.