PASSING OF A MASTER


When I was six or seven years old, I hardly remember now,
I used to bicycle through the winding dirt road deep in the country 	
to his house, a blood-rusted tin roof with leaky rickety front.

A widower, he was then a seventy-year old man.  No kids
of his own and hence, not a single grand-child.  Yet everyone 
in town knew the beekeeper, a grandfather to all them kids.
			
A snot-green kid, I would take Mama’s cornbread or pumpkin
pie to him on Thanksgivings and Christmas, or in summer I’d
take steamed okra picked from our little Victory garden.

For months, I anxiously awaited these trips, for the clouds of 
bees captured me with fear and curiosity, let alone his fist-size 	
ice-cold blackberries he kept inside his cool earthen cellar.  

He would gently hand me a queen cell, and in late autumn 
I’d take fat drones to school for show-and-tell.  An instant 		
celebrity, I’d loudmouth my expertise on berries and bees.

A gaunt man, he would pull frames with bare hands and no veil.
In fact, I don’t remember seeing him use a smoker.  Instead, 
rarely, he’d spray water “to calm his Italian gals down.”

He would tell me the secret of sting medicine: grab some dirt,
roll it in your spit, and rub it where it hurts, a miracle cure
that worked faster than any snake oil I ever known since.

A quiet man, he also taught me other secrets of beekeeping:
give them girls enough room for brood and store, and never
interfere with their romp and roam.  Tie up your hands!

“You are not a beekeeper,” he’d insist, “You are a bee-maid,
a monk dedicated to assist them to be what God made them to
be, for they’ve been taking care of themselves for eons.”

Now a beekeeper, I went back to his old shack—-long gone.
Hidden in the weeds, I saw his sunken shed, a collapsed lung.
Yet in the prairie winds, I could hear clouds of his bees, roar.







****When I exchanged a few emails with George a while back, I promised the 
bloke to post the above on his passing.  The best part of George was his 
hell-bent irascibility we all hate to love.  It was Liciano yesterday, and 
today it is you, George.  What a loss. . . .


Yoon

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