Memories of the man we called The Captain come back to me when I meet some people.

He shuffles his feet like they’re magnets stuck to the ground, he can’t pick them all the way up to take a proper step. His hands stay at his side while he moves. When he has enough momentum built up, he’s leaning forward and defying gravity. Like how children run before inevitably smashing their faces into the ground. It’s a wonder to behold.

He enters wearing a cheap Captains’s hat, the kind you buy your kids at some tourist trap, or maybe you buy it for yourself as a joke. It’s the kind of hat my wife would call a waste of money, and she would tease me for wearing it, and I’d constantly correct her and tell to begin each sentence with O Captain My Captain.

Bottom line: It’s a good hat.

My friend introduces us and I foolishly reach for his hand to shake it. This is a mistake. Anyone who’s worked with the developmentally delayed/impaired knows this. I didn’t have that much exposure at the time so I shook his hand.

Or, rather, he shook mine. He shook me. He wouldn’t let go. The more I tried to pull away the harder he squeezed and the closer he pulled me toward him. My friend tried not to laugh but to be honest he wasn’t doing a great job of it. I had to manoeuvre ever so slightly while letting him think I wasn’t trying to get away.

I lost.

My friend eventually distracted him enough for me to slip away.

Then he says to me, as an aside, “don’t shake his hand.”

“Thanks.” I say.

What else do you say after that? The Captain was a good man, he had his quirks but he was a good person.

I think of him, now and then, how could I not? Maybe you will now too. Maybe not.

But, if a man who hasn’t had a fair chance from the start, shuffling down some side street, sometimes covered in his own feces after an accident you might think is preventable but isn’t, can be a good person, what’s everyone else’s excuse?