There's a house down the street where a man known as "The Mayor" lives. He's presently 72 years old, and, oddly enough, this makes him one of the youngest senior citizens on the block.

He's also the sickest, but we'll come back to that. For all the years I've lived here, this retired fireman has stood out in his driveway, just watching cars go by and waving at them. Sometimes, if you stopped to try to talk to him, he'd give you one of those old time catch phrases that was supposed to be funny, but really wasn't, but you'd give him his due, sometimes anyway, and chuckle just a bit. In the summer he'd be standing out there without a shirt on; not a pretty sight, but it was his house. In the winter, he'd be out there in a thick coat with one of those Russian style hats pulled over his ears. Nothing stopped this guy from standing in the driveway outside of rain.

Then suddenly, he was gone. I finally checked with the resident reporters on the street and it seems he had a major back problem that put him down, and he had been moved to a rehab facility. Odd as it sounds, I kind of missed seeing him, because there's something comforting in knowing that there's one person who knows everything physically going on in the neighborhood. Then word got out that he had developed some other illnesses along the way, though no one was really sure what those illnesses were.

Suddenly, after two summers, he's back. He's not the same as he was, but he's back just the same. He's a shell of th man he was, and that's hard to say because he was a pretty thin man to begin with. He's obviously not in the best shape, because he's now sitting in a wheelchair, and he's rarely outside by himself. But he's out there, much closer to the house than he used to be, still waving at people as they pass by, and he seems to be happy.

I asked one of the other neighbors why he's still going outside, and I was told that he missed seeing people, and that seeing the vibrancy of the neighborhood makes him feel good to be alive.

How simple a statement that is; I think I'm going to steal it some day. For now, though, "The Mayor" is back.