That’s Howie. He’s a terrific enjoyer of life and people, because everything that isn’t evil is fine by him — which of course makes him great company. You can’t make him unhappy. Supper’s late? Maybe he can catch the last few minutes of the (your choice) football game; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the teams and is interested in all of them. Not only that, but he’ll share with you some of the arcane history that makes a particular team unique. The games have all ended? Hey, what about a board game? He loves ‘em.
Howie helped start a new church a few years ago, which has now grown to about 200 members. He serves as an elder there, and has just returned from a three-week mission trip to Mongolia, which he described with such characteristic enthusiasm that we didn’t glimpse the rugged nature of the living conditions until he shared some of his photos from the trip — and even then, he was focusing on identifying the people in the pictures and pointing with pride to the things they’d built. We were the ones saying things like, “What? No plumbing?” and “Where were the beds?”
As you might expect, he has many friends, but what interested me most was the way animals responded to him. We visited some friends out in the country who have a couple of camels, and the young one, Humphrey, who was out in a paddock, headed straight toward Howie and placed his head on Howie’s shoulder as if to say, “At last you’re here.” Howie was the only stranger in the group, but to Humphrey he was the pied piper, or perhaps a long-lost relative. The two were inseparable for as long as we stayed in the paddock.
Dogs and cats flocked to him wherever we went, and he acknowledged laughingly that in Mongolia even the fierce wild dogs he had been warned to avoid would come from a great distance and stand quietly to be petted.
We saw some trained birds while he was with us (courtesy of the folks who own the camels), and they, too, responded to him. The macaws broke their silence and spoke in eerily human voices — “Hello. Going to work? See you later” —- and the ravens moved with him as he walked around their cages.
As someone who has precisely the opposite effect on most animals, I observed all of this with fascination. They’ve pegged us accurately — I’m not much interested in animals as a category; Howie loves everything that lives — but how do they know? How does a Mongolian wild dog recognize it from 100 yards away? However it works, we certainly enjoyed having Howie with us, sharing the sunshine of his benevolence and warming us all with his love of life. If it’s a gift he’s been given, he is busy and happy giving it back in all directions.
Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.
For other editorials and columns, see the Sept. 10 issue of The Commerce News.
