The Master of Rolling Eyes

 Bernard Gensle's bespectacled eyes were like brown M&Ms set into a large head with a big face with big features: half-cookie ears, curved knob of a nose, broad mouth and engorged lips.

His double portioned features softened with his smile or the way his eyes danced when he sailed groan-inducing puns that would have you laughing if only at his animated expressions,  and no one but no one could roll his eyes as could Bernie when he'd  deliver a zinger and his brown orbs would arc to the 11 o'clock position with the grace and beauty of a slow motion golf swing.

He was as much character as caricature, in a Hamburg-sometimes-pork-pied hat over dark hair, dressy suspenders over a starched shirt, cuffed dress slacks and buffed shoes, and hand-tied bow around his neck, ever projecting the professional who arrived at work as a "Public Accountant" every day in the days when "Certified" was a high-brow rarity.

You'd often see a Phillies "Cheroot" cigar perpendicular to his over-upholstered fingers, fingers on hands that could have been mini-catchers' mitts, but always extended for a all-enveloping shake or pat on the head.
His massive 1940s typewriter took decades of pounding in his basement writer's nook, ate miles of ribbons as Bernie wrote stories devouring reams on reams of cheap stock, many tales chronicling his experiences as a soldier in Africa, chasing and fighting Rommel's  'Afrika Corps.'

As I leftmy Godfather's house that late August day, we exchanged smiles--his punctuated by a Bernie signature wink--each of us knowing it would be the last time our eyes would lock and, two days after my birthday, he died, the silenced punch-line now just a punch delivered to my gut with force enough to exhaust my emotional wind and double me over with  grief for a man who walked his Catholic faith as humbly as a bare footed tap dance.