Easy to love, hard to lose

— Ipicked up the ringing phone about three weeks ago to hear a comforting word: “Bryles.”

That would be Stephen Bryles, former state senator from Blytheville and director of the state Livestock and Poultry Commission.

I felt an instant surge of strong human connection, indeed delight. Then, just as suddenly, I felt guilt.

I commenced apologizing profusely for not having come to see him. I reached for the tired crutch of having had the best intentions. I assured him that, of course, I had been thinking of him.

All I’d actually done was send him an email saying that I loved him. But that was entirely too convenient, too easy, both to send a digital message and to love Steve Bryles.

Some friends of mine who were better friends of his-old fraternity brothers of his-kept me posted on the damnable medical ills of this man they called “Pumpkin.” The nickname was a reference to the immense size of his head.

It was a nickname I knew because these friends had declared that I was the only person they knew with an even bigger head than “Pumpkin.”

Bryles, at 55, had esophageal cancer. Or he had had it.

The radiation had destroyed some of the cancer. A surgical extraction had taken the rest. But, naturally, the treatment was about to get him.

He told me he’d go back into surgery in a few days to try to get the hole in his esophagus mended by transferring rib tissue. And, well, he said with standard and ever-cool understatement, the procedure was a bit risky and something to which he was not much looking forward.

But he really needed to be able to swallow.

That’s not why he was calling, though. He was calling about others.

The family of a late friend of his, 52-year-old public school teacher Vickie Freemyer of Blytheville, had recently won a $2.97 million award from the state Claims Commission.

Freemyer had been pulling out onto the highway when she was broadsided and killed by a state trooper’s car going 103 miles per hour in a 45-mile-per-hour zone, and doing so without a flashing light or siren.

Bryles told me his legislative instincts told him that the Legislature, newly infested with conservatives who want to cut taxes and spending, might balk at approving that amount of money in an appropriation to get the claim actually paid.

Don’t let them get away with it if they try, he implored. Ride herd on that claim, please, he said. Shine the light if need be, he asked.

Of course I will.

Bryles never recovered from that surgery. He died Friday morning.

He was unlike any other politician I have known-smart, but understated; good-hearted, but with a rascal’s glint; detached, but warm; knowledgeable on issues, but loath to speak in public from shyness or lack of confidence in his skills of articulation.

He made the mistake of running for the Democratic congressional nomination in the 1st District in 2010.

It was a mistake because he lacked broadly applicable retail political skills. He could engage you, and deeply, but only individually and only with time.

And he didn’t really live in the district anymore. He resided in Little Rock to reap advantages for his young son. The people of Mississippi County knew it and didn’t much like it.

One day late in the campaign, he called and said he was headed to a busy intersection in Jonesboro-Caraway and something-where he’d hoist a sign and wave at motorists during rush hour. I hung up thinking Bryles was headed to his least natural habitat.

He ran way low in a large field.

In his tribute, Gov. Mike Beebe said he couldn’t recall Bryles ever losing his temper.

I can’t either. But he had great compassion for the underprivileged, and perhaps even greater passion-and impatience-for educational opportunity.

His old state Senate colleague in educational-reform pursuits, Jim Argue of Little Rock, tells of their visiting the central brain-trust of the KIPP charter school movement. He recalls Bryles becoming so excited during a briefing that he declared urgently, “Get me a KIPP school in Blytheville, damn it.”

He got one a couple of years ago. Kids in Mississippi County are getting broader educational opportunities thanks to him.

I don’t know if KIPP ever shares a school name with a person. But the Stephen Bryles KIPP Middle School of Blytheville would not be inappropriate.

P.S.-That last phone conversation with Bryles ended on the topic of Roscoe, my new beagle pup. I do this running bit on Facebook that I call “The Roscoe Chronicles” and in which I detail the boogie-woogie beagle boy’s misadventures.

Bryles was a Facebook friend and dog-lover. He told me I wasn’t fooling anybody-that I was transparently charmed, not irritated, when Roscoe destroyed a sofa pillow or turned on an outside faucet or dug up a backyard shrub or climbed on my desk and made his perch on the mouse pad.

Steve Bryles had great insight. He also had a great dog of his own, of course.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 01/01/2013

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