For death was a subject he knew too well.
When we moved next door in 2003, he gently shook my hand wearing a green cardigan the colour of a bellbird's plumage. No one else could have pulled it off. He looked stylish.
In the ensuing years the buttoned garment was a regular feature on the footpath as he ambled by on his daily constitutional past our house.
The gait was steady at first. But as the seasons fell away it slowed to pensioner's pace, then slower, then slower yet.
His expression never wavered. A quiet smile on the lips, a walking stick clutched the way only the elderly can, a still-dark head of hair worked loosely into shape.
Other times he'd often watch me play cricket with my boys on the front lawn. So slowly did he saunter he could see an entire over bowled before walking the length of our section. It's a beautiful thing when you reach an age where an hour's walk doesn't necessitate leaving your street.
I was, and still am, jealous of anyone who can walk that slow, walk with a complete absence of haste.
In the later years, as he approached 80, we spoke rarely, mostly because he'd forgotten my name, and it was difficult to do so. There were only fleeting moments of lucidity.
Unlike him I walked too fast and struggled to find the time to throw out the anchor in the hope he'd remembered our previous conversations.
Police once knocked at my door to ask if I knew him as he'd forgotten where he parked his car.
Not long after that I had to help him out of the bath. Something had scared him, his lovely wife couldn't move him and simply refused to budge from the drained tub.
Irrationally, he yelled at me each time I attempted to lift him. Good for him. Who interrupts another man's bath anyway?
But it was a new low. This was a previously articulate academic. To see him like that was unsettling. With all the challenges of life, many of which he'd conquered, a simple bath could now undo him.
Before those times though, we spoke often enough.
His son, who ended his life by his own hand many years before, was never discussed. Later, an adult daughter also took her own life.
We went to poetry readings, drank the occasional ale and often retrieved his axe from a knotted piece of pine. He had the strength to raise the axe and let it fall, but never to then wrench it free.
Favourite topics were literature, theology, his teaching days at Te Aute College - and marriage. "When you've been married for so long you become marriage", he once said, letting slip a little laugh.
I was never quite sure what he meant until one night when he read a poem dedicated to his wife, live at the then Cat & Fiddle pub, with the opening line: "When I look at you, my love, I see my own face".
I marvelled at how a man who'd suffered monstrous loss could still unleash such beauty. What marvellous courage.
Anyway old fella, perhaps Monday's not the best day to eulogise you to the readers. It wasn't my intention at all.
I had intended to write something about the All Blacks' win.
Yet I couldn't help but pen something about how privileged I was to live next door, and how forgiving you were of the unforgiving minute.
I could think of nothing else at my keyboard yesterday, looking from the living room out to the street, missing your bellbird-green cardigan, missing the only fan of my right arm medium-paced deliveries.
Mark Story is assistant editor at Hawke's Bay Today.
