Growing up I had a mean neighbor....

Mr. Franchini. Mr. Franchini didn't hang around with the locals, preferred his own company.... and my Dad, my Dad's brothers, all had warned us to 'stay away from Mr. Franchini, he'll shoot you". Yeah, in those days parents didn't play around with threats. And so....

We kids came up with stories about him, invented... but that we came to believe were true. Real horror stories.... graves of kids he'd shot and buried in the bamboo patch by his barn. I never spoke a word to Mr. Franchini during my entire youth... only watching him closely standing in OUR field that bordered his. I suppose I was about 15, maybe 16, when I first made contact with him... still scared to death of him, by the way.

We shared a ditch between the two fields for irrigation. Mr. Franchini was irrigating his field and I was preparing our field for irrigation. Mr. Franchini had set his irrigation pipe and gone back inside to sit out the scorching afternoon. Working nearby I saw he had suffered a ditch break, not overly large but definitely a bad situation... so I hurried over with my shovel and began repairs. Mr. Franchini's house wasn't far away and perhaps he heard me working out there but for whatever reason he came out having noticed me working on the ditch. Yes, I was scared... but kept repairing the ditch.

He came up to me, his own shovel in hand, and without saying a word starting helping me. Took us maybe 15 minutes or so. After... he thanked me. AND...began somewhat of a conversation. A "Mr. Franchini conversation" meaning not a lot of small talk. He knew my name, and my age. That surprised the hell out of me. Asked how I was doing in school and admonished me to study hard because education was important.

In the following years I met him, out in the field, several times.... never speaking more than a few words, but always as friendly as friendly gets.

Mr. Franchini simply liked his privacy... was not a 'talker'.... and didn't have a mean bone in his body, much less kids bones in his bamboo patch.

never got a chance to thank him for being my fantasy 'monster under the bed', (so to speak)... but that's ok, I'm quite confident I know how he would have reacted to the news...he wouldn't have said a word, he would have just grinned.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/2020 05:00PM by JamesJM.