Gary Luckey

Prompted by my bladder, I get out of bed around 4 am, and turn on the coffeemaker and head for the plumbing. Then I look out the kitchen window hoping to see Venus at the moment it rises above the rooftops, but I’m always too early or too late, and now it is too cloudy. I go into the dark studio with my mug of coffee and light the candle and sit on the sofa and look at my phone.

A message from my sister was sent at 10:35 pm:

Gary went to Heaven a few minutes ago. He loved you dearly.

It almost seems I was always conscious of Gary but I had already accomplished more than two years of infancy when he appeared at our church and our home. We were new arrivals to Florida and my earliest dim memories come from Midway, Kentucky, and Jamestown, New York. Lake Park was a small town. My father preached at a Southern Baptist Church on Park Avenue and Gary’s parents ran Luckey’s Grocery, also on Park Avenue, and near the railroad track. Gary worked in back as the butcher. I remember the grocery being a general store that sold feed in printed bags that country women made clothes from and I remember the smell of the butchery and the bloody sawdust on the floor and strips of fly paper the men hanging out smoking cigarettes and talking and arguing and a baseball game on the radio. The Luckeys, James and Lela and their sons Glynn and Gary attended our church and sang the hymns.

Until the 1970s Gary had greased back black hair. I believe he was named after Gary Cooper but he  looked more like Montgomery Clift, maybe, but not moody, and Betty was kind of Liz Taylor, but more Scandinavian. He and my sister were in love and they were a very good-looking couple. I was a little blonde kid. Gary said I would walk up and down the aisle at church, stop at each pew, and stare at the worshippers sitting there. When I was that age he rescued me after I was abducted by two teenage boys. They stripped off my pants. One of them said, “Here comes his brother” and they put me in a garbage can. Gary lifted me out and found my pants. I couldn’t describe the boys, I only remembered that they thought Gary was my brother. Gary isn’t my brother, I thought, he is Glynn’s brother. I am Betty’s brother.

When I was 2, Betty was 13, Gary was 17. Now I’m 66, Betty is 77, and Gary was 80. 

On his 80th birthday, Gary had symptoms of Covid and was waiting for test results. The next day he was hospitalized and eventually put on a ventilator. He was in the hospital four weeks and died October 15.

This is from the obituary:

He was born on September 20, 1940 in Ft. Myers, FL to the late James Franklin and Lela Stewart Luckey. Gary graduated from Palm Beach High School, and Palm Beach Junior  College. He was a member of the renowned Palm Beach High School choir. Gary was a quality control technician for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft near West Palm Beach for 38 years until his retirement in 2000. He owned and managed two restaurants at Brighton Seminole Indian Reservation called The Wind Mill Cafe and Alice's Restaurant. Gary was an avid hunter, fisherman and fourth generation Florida Cattleman. He was a member of Notla Baptist Church and loved signing in the choir. 

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The first generation of Luckeys to migrate to Florida from North or South Carolina after the Civil War rounded up scrub cattle, feral cattle that inhabited the Florida wilderness. Gary was a cowboy, but had a regular job at Pratt Whitney. I helped him for a brief time in my early teens, feeding and herding and mending barbed wire fences and it was fun to play cowboy. I became a fan of cartoonist Ace Reid, who drew “Cow Pokes” on calendars sold in feed stores. I imitated Reid’s style, drawing lean slouching cowboys who evolved, in a couple of years, into drawings of hippies, and I also evolved into a hippie.

I’ve been trying to think of what to say about him for the past week. I finally talked to his son, my nephew, a couple of days ago. His name wasn’t in my cell phone and then I texted his ex-wife by mistake and then I called and left voicemail and then he called back from a tree stand in Missouri. I’m not sure what a tree stand is except that it is where hunters station themselves. It made sense to me Tifton would go hunting. Tifton is a lot like Gary. I told him I didn’t have anything to say and I wanted to say something.

Gary was one of the most interesting people I have ever known. Lori called him a raconteur. He was at home in wild Florida and knew the name of every plant and bird. He introduced me to the semiotics of tracking deer. His family ate what he killed — deer, hogs, rabbits, fish, gator tail. He cooked the best steak I ever had on a fire in a hunting camp. Sometimes, when he had a hankering for swamp cabbage, he would cut down a cabbage palm and chop it up with an ax to extract the heart. He also took me fishing when I was a kid, usually west of Palm Beach County, deep in the woods. One night, on an impulse, he bought a couple of rod and reels and took me snook fishing at the Jupiter Inlet near the lighthouse. He pointed out the phosphorescence in the water caused by plankton, but I don’t remember if we caught anything. Stuff like that. 

He impressed Lori when we were watching an alligator swimming in Fish-eating Creek toward the opposite shore. “Try calling him,” Betty said, and Gary made a sound in his throat. The alligator made a hairpin turn and headed toward us. Fortunately we were sitting in a pickup truck.

Some time ago, Gary read Abraham Heschel, the rabbi activist and author of God In Search of Man and The Prophets, and for a while was interested in converting to Judaism. When I last visited Betty and Gary they were attending a Baptist church on the Seminole reservation and she played piano there. His love for the prophets never left him and his favorite Bible verse was from the prophet Micah — “what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

I took refuge at Betty and Gary’s place during a personal crisis once and went to church with them. The pastor had all the men in the congregation line up in a row, all these men from the tribe, and Gary and me, and we sang a hymn we knew since our old church in Lake Park —

“He hideth my soul in the cleft of a rock, that shadows a dry, thirsty land.

He hideth my life in the depths of His love, and covers me there with His hand, and covers me there with his hand”.

One of the first memories that came to me when I heard he was gone

was of following him through a swamp at night. The water was halfway to our knees and I had on sneakers and he was barefoot, and I was staying in his foot steps, confident the water moccasins were getting out of the way of Gary Luckey.