Respect

I don't know how to explain someone like Spero in the context of my life. Losing him is like losing a marker of a certain time and a certain feeling. He was, as they say, a "fixture." I think I take losing fixtures hard. There is this thing about suddenly not having that mirror to a tiny, intimately weird part of myself that feels extra odd. Spero was that mirror in that way I am finding. I met him in the early 2000s, inevitably as it would soon to become, in front of a television watching a soccer game. For over a decade every time I'd wander in to watch a soccer game, first son in tow, Spero would look up from his place at whichever local bar it was, and he happened to be at whichever local bar I wandered into, no matter how inconsequential the game, and give me a sly, wry smile and look at my boy and laugh and say something slightly dark and diminishing about the state of whatever pitch-side affairs were taking place. Now that I think about it, he was one of the last intact tendons to that time in the neighborhood when that could happen with all regularity. As it seems to happen, I will not only miss him entirely, or as far as I can miss him entirely, but the time in which he was so very much a part of my sense of things. I will miss him very much indeed. Respect.