Snapshots: Pancho

his given name was Robert, and that was the name he went by in the real world.  He was Robert at school, Robert at work.  Robert was sewn onto his karate gi.  it was on his driver's license and his pilot's license.  Robert was the name on his bills, and the name on the pin-up girl checks he used to pay those bills.  from the day he was born, though, he was Pancho to the family.  our father started calling him that in tribute to his best friend, and we never called him anything else. 

Pancho was 6 years older than me and, in many ways, we were as different as two brothers could be.  he was tall and lanky; i...not so much.  he rode bulls; i attended college with a longhorn bull as the mascot.  he liked baseball; i liked football.  he could construct houses; i could construct sentences in latin. 

our personalities were completely different as well.  Pancho liked people, and people liked him.  he seemed to know every third cousin and great aunt twice-removed as well as he knew the immediate family; he was certainly as comfortable with them.  that was something i could never manage.  i tended to stick to certain individuals in the family, but Pancho didn't.  for Pancho, family was family, no matter how removed.  and if he was your friend, he was your friend for life.

yet, as different as we were, i'd like to think we had a few things in common.  one was work.  Pancho always had a job or two--heck, he even had a job during his, um, illness.  i've been constantly employed since i was 15 (save for one semester of college in Austin).  i'm sure he worked harder than i did, but the point is that we both valued work. 

Pancho and i also enjoyed shooting pool.  we never had a pool table, but we used to play at the bowling alley and, later, in bars.  he was always better than i was, but it never bothered me to lose to him.  he would teach me stuff as we played, and it was fun.  he later became apprenticed to a master cue stick maker, and i'm proud to own some sticks that Pancho worked on with him.

the one interest that we shared with equal zeal was reading.  we both devoured books, but i'll always be grateful that Pancho introduced me to Louis L'Amour and, most importantly, J.R.R Tolkien.  he convinced me to read The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings when i was in junior high and it was a revelation to me.  however, i didn't know a single other person in my family or, indeed, our entire town who had ever read the books or were remotely interested in reading them, so Pancho was the only person i could talk to about them.  it was our secret (obviously, not for long), and we never stopped talking about books or recommending them to each other. 

we lost Pancho earlier this month.  i'm sorry we didn't do more together as adults (we almost never lived in same state), but that's just the way it is.  in a way, though, it doesn't matter.  Pancho was a constant.  if you knew Pancho 40 years ago, he was exactly the same person 40 years later (though, thankfully, he wasn't still shooting at me with a BB gun 40 years later.  he probably wanted to, though).  our cousin Steve, who officiated at Pancho's funeral, said that Pancho was real, and that is certainly true.  i believe that it's his realness and his constancy that will help fill in the hole that his passing has left in our lives.