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Institutionalized on his sixty-fifth birthday, Ole Howie was in his mid eighty's when I first met him and was as vital as he was the day he was committed. I included the man in my Journal because he was so representative of the kind, gentle, innocent, simple people that proliferate Health Centers. At least the Sugar Loaf facility.

Howie and so many like him constitute the rare breed of mankind void of ulterior motive. He stood out mid-twentieth-century because of his utter contrast to the mental existentialism of the time, the post-war meaning-seekers, the nihilists and all those who had abandoned God (or never knew Him) and thought complexity was a virtue. Howie Hartwig was Adam before the apple.

The first time I saw Howie was when I strolled down the men's wing my second day at Sugar Loaf. Leaning nonchalantly against a water fountain was a burly fluff of a man stuffed carelessly into bib overalls urinating in the water fountain. Finished, he backed off, never thinking of "flushing" or zipping up. He just smiled at his most recent accomplishment and sauntered off to what Nature presented next. While everyone agrees this is gross and highly unhygienic, critics should remember that years later

Forrest Gump became a hero being as uninhibited in front of President Johnson when he dropped his drawers and showed him his battle scar. When I saw Gump I reflected in my Journal that had Howie's life been made into a movie he would have made Gump look like a rocket scientist.

Not long after the fountain incident, I went outdoors to bang push-brooms against the building and who should I meet but the old timer trying to relive his youth by leaning on spread-eagled Frolicking Fran with her dress up to her belly button. I laughed spontaneously as watched old Howie doing vertical push-ups against the seventy year-old. It was a sight to bring a smile to a funeral parlor proprietor, this octogenarian only faintly remembering how to do it and his simple recipient not caring. At their levels of impotence, the act was totally harmless, but it certainly brought a smile to my face.

If I were to name the old man after a literary figure, I would choose a senile version of the hero of Victor Hugo's book,LesMiserables. Jean Val Jean was known as The Jack because of his extraordinary strength. So, too, Howie Hartwig. I personally watched the aged Resident lift a hundred-pound propane tank when he was eight-five while his peers could barely hoist a cigarette lighter to their wheezing lips. I thank God that He endowed the old man with great simplicity, for had he used his strength maliciously he would have been on the Circuit immediately.

After some investigating, I found the senior Hartwig had one black mark against him. It was buried deep in the Sugar Loaf archives. During his first year, some freshly accredited Medical Aide had accidentally given the behemoth the wrong medicine. After downing it and realizing the mistake, he lifted the petrified girl by the armpits and threw her through the plate glass window as if she were a basketball made of feathers. Everyone knew whose fault it was so they didn't discharge him. It never

happened again. The Med Aide left and everyone became super-vigilant when giving medication to all Residents.

Ole Howie loved to play croquet. Somehow the idea of putting the ball through the wicket fascinated him. When summer came and the Staff set up the court, ten shock guns couldn't have kept Howie inside. What amazed onlookers was the Gargantua played his own way: he got on his knees and spied each wicket like a golfer. Then, laughing, as if God had invented the game just for him, this bib-garbed hulk thrust his arm through the wicket yelling, "I did it! I got ball through!" Everyone at Sugar Loaf should have been content with his eccentric approach and thankful that he didn't take a liking to the mallets or other players. I always wondered what he would have done had he gotten the notion to pound something in the ground. Or throw one of those pretty wooden thingie-thingies. I experienced great joy watching this six-foot-eight giant sprawled on the grass, his arm outstretched as his huge fist swallowed the croquet ball, giggling innocently. It was one of the highlights in working at the Health Center.

In one of my more profound moments, I wrote in my Journal the incredible loss modern mankind experiences by sending its Howies to health facilities. If only society valued the extended family as it did in olden times, where all its members lived in the same home, there would always be supervision of both the young and very old. Its retarded members would then be sources of joy instead of embarrassment or feeling imposed upon. A side benefit would be a greatly diminished need for TV, because simply watching God's innocent children would bring natural joy to millions.

I grew very fond of Howie Hartwig, as everyone did, even Staff who followed him from water fountain to kitchen sink. Once he was known as

harmless, he was the joy of our jobs. I feel fortunate to have been asked to say some words at his funeral. It didn't bother me that no family attended because we were his family: Staff and Administrators from the Sugar Loaf Health Center.Weknew he lived after his biological family made him vanish on his sixty-fifth birthday, and everyone felt deeply when he passed.

Standing before Staff and Residents, I felt like a boy talking about his much-loved uncle. It was a great tribute to the man that everyone felt the same. Here was the cheap, over-sized casket as simple in its trappings as the body it held. I smiled when I thought what endless joy Howie would have had he considered the box one of his water fountains! But now we would never see him lean over another sink or against a brick wall again. No one felt embarrassed when I cried because everyone was doing the same. Old Howie Hartwig was what humanity is all about. Being your brother's keeper and loving your neighbor. That day all humanity, in the guise of big ole Howie the simple man, was dignified.