I open the back door and find a basket that somebody left there. Upon examining its contents, I discover a book by Studs Terkel, another one by Elie Wiesel and a six-pack of beer. Each bottle of beer in the six-pack is different from the others: a dark German stout, a lager from Tennessee, a porter from Brazil, a pilsner from China, a rice beer from Japan and a wheat lager from Oklahoma.

Delighted, I pick up the basket of goodies and bring it into the house bellowing, “Mary Ellen! Lenny Gillion’s been over!”

Lenny would do things like that. He lived a quarter of a mile away from me, and, periodically, he'd drop off a Care package on my back porch. No note. No way of identifying who the benefactor was. But we all knew it was Lenny.

We had a pig roast one summer and invited all of our friends and neighbors. We must have had a hundred people milling and mixing around our yard, but only one showed up in lederhosen with his own cooler of obscure beers that he shared with me…Lenny.

A few years ago, before the advent of our German Shepherd, Dixie Dog, Mary and I had a pointer, Bailey, and golden retriever, Sammy.

Now, living in the country as we do, we let our dogs pretty much run as free as our cats. And, when they grew older, both dogs would go off together down our country road and make their daily rounds of all the neighbors’ houses. Only Leonard and Pricilla Gillion would let them in. The Gillions had a cabinet in their kitchen that was full of dog biscuits. Funny, because the Gillions didn’t own a dog. The treats were solely for Bailey and Sam.

Lenny called Sammy a thief because Lenny had a habit of taking his shoes off on his back steps before entering his house, and Sammy had habit of absconding with said shoes. Sammy would steal them and drop them off on my back stoop. Once he brought back a slipper. Once, a boot. Once, it was a pair of Lenny’s underpants. (I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I never asked.)

Now, again because we live in the country, we are kind of loose about getting our dogs registered with the town hall. So they don’t have licenses. Well, one day I came home from work and noticed that Bailey was sporting a brand new, fluorescent orange collar. When I mentioned to Mary Ellen that I liked the new dog collar, she looked at me as if I had two heads. (Which, in fact, I do. But that’s besides the point.)

When I called the dog over for closer examination, I discovered that, not only did she have a new collar, but the collar had a shiny new license tag hanging off of it!

Lenny Gillion had struck again!

Lenny was constantly sending me jokes via the internet. Some corny. Some poignant. All were good-natured.

Lenny was an Irish, liberal Democrat in a town that is primarily Republican. Every liberal candidate for any office, local, state or federal, had a campaign sign planted firmly in his front yard, right underneath the flagpole that proudly flew the flag of Ireland right below Old Glory. (Those flags flew twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with spotlights illuminating them when the sun went down.)

Lenny was proud of the fact that he flew bombing missions during World War Two over Germany. He was equally proud of his wife, Pricilla, who was an Army nurse during the war. (“The things that she saw,” he once told me “would make a man shudder and puke, but my Pricilla never flinched. She had a duty to perform.”)

Although I was thirty years younger than he was, he considered me a compadre, and, in his words, a partner in crime. Even though we only saw each other four or five times a year, there was an incredibly strong bond between us. We could go long stretches without seeing each other, and then, when we met up, we would pick up where we left off as if we had just seen each other the day before.

Together, we would argue with the staunchest of conservative Republicans, and we would commiserate with each other afterwards, discussing what Lenny called, “the stupidity and the audacity of all who disagree with us.”

Last year, I was at my house in Florida for a few weeks in January. At that time, I didn’t have wireless internet. Therefore, I had limited access to cyberspace. When I finally checked my email on a friend’s computer, I found an urgent message from Lenny’s daughter Nancy. The message stated that old Lenny was dying from renal failure, and he had requested that somebody get a hold of Jim Hetrick and let him know about it. Nancy said that I was one of the people that Lenny wanted to see one last time.

I immediately called him, and we spoke, and we laughed. He ended the conversation with, “Well, young fella, we’ve been covering each other’s backs here in Coventry for a long time. Now, I guess it’s all up to you to fight the good fight.”

I cried when I hung up the phone because I knew that, when I got to Connecticut in a week, Lenny would be gone.

Well, he fooled everybody, including his doctors. Somehow or another, his kidneys started working again, and, although he was considerably weaker than he was before, he was still Lenny. He was pretty much confined to the house from that point on. Every time I visited him, he was in his pajamas and bathrobe, and he was in the company of his two constant companions, Pricilla and the oxygen bottle.

Lenny hung on for well over a year, holding court at his kitchen table, dispensing verdicts on society in general and selected idiots in particular. His witticisms continued to keep me in stitches and kept other folks on their toes.

Then last week, it happened again. His kidneys failed, and Lenny was put on a death-watch. When I visited him the last time, he was in his hospital bed in his bedroom, and his beloved Pricilla was lying in her bed right next to him.

The skin on his hands had a rubbery, waxy, translucent look to them. His eyes were ruemy and watery. He looked frail and drawn. When he spoke, it was in a soft, muffled voice. He held Pricilla’s hand the whole time that I was there.

His mind was still sharp as a tack, and he still wove his rambling, convoluted stories. He still railed against the stupidity and the arrogance of the poltical “loyal opposition.” And he still made me laugh.

He told me that, in his whole life, he had never hated anybody. Nobody. “Not even that crook Nixon.” Then he corrected himself and said, “I take that back. I did hate one man. Just one. You may have heard of him. His name was Adolf Hitler.”

Understandable.

After about a half hour of visiting, it became apparent that Lenny was getting fatigued. So I decided to leave. As I stood up to go, he gripped my hand in his, and he wouldn’t let it go. Then he said, “Tell Mary Ellen that I’d like to see her.”

I told him I would.

(Mary did come and visit with him the next day, and he was so pleased to see her that he called her an angel and kissed her hand.)

I turned to leave, and he still wouldn’t let go of my hand. He shook it with surprising force, and he said, “I don’t want to let go," looking piercingly into my eyes. “I wish I had spent more time with you.”

Our eyes met and locked. After a moment, I found my voice and said something like, “It’s been great, Lenny.”

He nodded and smiled and said, “That is has, old friend. And now, you have to face them alone. Don’t let the bastards get you down! Fight the good fight!”

I promised him I would.

Then I turned and walked out of the room.