You meet many people and personalities in this journey across life!
When we first moved to Marion, Illinois almost ten years ago and began to hang out at the Marion Ministerial Alliance, other wise know locally as the “soup kitchen”, we did not know many people but we have always known about the friendliness of the people of the streets. As is our custom in new situations we gradually eased into the scene and did not reach out to that many people, seeing whom might welcome us and whom might simply pass us by.
Enter Leroy and Frankie! They were among the first to make us feel welcome and wanted in our new home town. We did not think of them as two probable gay people when we first met them. They were just two nice souls who gave us of their time and made us feel as if the city of Marion might be a place to live for the long term. We have met other people but Leroy and Frankie have stood out to us through the years because of their friendliness at a time when we didn’t have all that many local friends. Leroy was the older of the two by at least fifteen years and the two had been together for longer than any one who worked or lived at the old age high rise could remember. Although the high rise was for the elderly, anyone who qualified could live there. Leroy and Frankie grew older together as they spent their days visiting their separate apartments (unmarried people cannot live together in public housing) and, where we frequently saw them, either at the soup kitchen or in front of the high rise swinging in the swings provided there. Neither one of them were especially bright people although Frankie was much more of a conversationalist than was Leroy. Frankie and Leroy both had been classified as mental problem cases and both of them frequently saw professionals in those categories. Leroy was the more moody of the two and, because of Frankie’s more passive nature, was generally the one who directed the friendship in whatever direction it was going to go. When we would park our vehicle in the parking lot to either visit someone at the high rise or the soup kitchen, however, it would usually be Leroy who would open his upper floor apartment window and yell a greeting to us on the street.
As the years have gone by, our circle of friends has broadened greatly around Marion and Leroy and Frankie and I do not spend much time together any longer as we are constantly busy and didn’t have as much time for them. But still, any time that we saw them, they were open and friendly and always had a kind word for us. Some in the building where they lived looked down on the two of them but they simply ignored what went on around them and lived their lives as two free Americans living the hand that had been dealt them. Over the last year, however, we would see more and more of Frankie and less and less of Leroy. Leroy smoked and Frankie didn’t and Leroy was getting older and less healthy as the years turned into decades while Frankie seemed to only get a little fatter as the time passed by. Leroy’s declining health began to stress their friendship probably because Leroy was getting closer and closer to the end and felt helpless about what would happen to Frankie once he was gone. If anything can be said of these two, it was that they very much loved each other.
Leroy died last week after his long illness and we saw Frankie, who simply told us that Leroy had been kind of mean to him over the last few months and that it was probably better that he had died because it was breaking Frankie’s heart to see what was happening to his friend. A friend who works at the high rise said that she had been there for twenty two years and could not tell us how much longer than that that the two of them had lived there and had been together. Perhaps they themselves did not really know! Leroy and Frankie liked soft drinks and sunny days and sitting out on the swings in front of the high rise. They had a simple life born out of the simplicity of their beings. And, they are part of the forty seven percent that Mitt Romney calls “those people”! Neither of them were capable of working for a living but neither of them ever considered themselves victims that we ever knew of. They simply loved each other and each new day that God had given them on this earth. And, Frankie will miss Leroy very, very much! And we wonder what will happen to all of the Frankie’s of this world if Mitt Romney and the neocon republicans come to power, or if they even care.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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