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He had been shy by nature, a quiet country boy who grew up in a tin-roofed cottage on a sandy clearing in Hope Mills, near Fayetteville. The little white house with the red brick chimney was surrounded on all sides by a thicket of pine trees.

Dad and his sister, mysteriously nicknamed "Hett" (I don't know to this day what that means), were reared in relative seclusion on a farm with hogs, chickens and sprawling fields of corn and tobacco.

How country was he?

I remember my daddy sitting barefoot on Grandma Johnson's front porch and plucking crows out of the sky above the cornfield with a shotgun.

As he became a man he retained some degree of that shyness; he could be cordial but wary. He chose his friends carefully and valued their quality over their quantity.

If you were his buddy, you were a real good buddy. And if you weren't, well, you weren't.

He didn't like eating out all that much. Mom's home cooking was fancy dining enough for him.

His cars were all big-boned American creations that rumbled with horsepower; he loved popping the hood of my little imports and chuckling at the tiny engines.

Anyway, after a career first at Central Motor Lines in Greensboro and Charlotte, and then Pilot Freight Lines in Kernersville, Dad retired to work on his cars and tend the lawn.

But he became restless and before too long there he was at the Winn-Dixie, happily working several days a week and giving Mom the luxury of having him pick up a bottle of vanilla flavoring or a bag of potatoes ... without having to send him to the store.

He went to work in a good mood and he came home in a good mood.
We didn't know much about what happened in between except for an occasional story about interesting people he'd met. We knew he liked his boss and the cashiers.

And that was about it.

Then one night my mom came home from Bible study and discovered that Dad had died peacefully, only a few days removed from his 73rd birthday.

The sheer suddenness of it stunned me. For a while, I sat speechless the next morning. Then I cried.

And I felt for Grandma, a tiny lady with long, thick black hair who had to bear the pain of outliving one of her children.

Over the next few days friends and relatives filled the house, many of them familiar faces.

And many whom I'd never seen or heard of before.

They were young and old, black and white, mothers and their children, teenagers and twentysomethings.

Some were his Winn-Dixie co-workers, but many more were regular customers who smiled and introduced themselves and recounted long litanies of kindnesses, large and small, from the man they called "Mr. Allen."

In their eyes he was a gentle, outgoing man who had reached out to strangers and to whom strangers had reached back.

We were surprised — and not surprised. We'd known the occasionally gruff exterior hid a Teddy bear, but we thought that was a side of his character reserved only for his family.

And we were right. His family had just grown a lot bigger in those years.

I think about him when I drive past that Winn-Dixie on the way home from work.

Soon it, too, will be a memory.

Editorial Page Editor Allen H. Johnson's columns run on Sundays in the Ideas section.