Remembering Ron Hicks

I don’t remember the first year my friend Tony invited me up to his house for the Fourth of July.

I know what the plan was. It was the Fourth, it was his mom’s birthday, and we were going to grill out, eat some of his dad’s smoked pork ribs, shoot off some fireworks, and drink some beers. That was the invitation. That was the door.

But when Ron and Ann Hicks opened that door, they opened it wider than I knew.

Because the invitation they extended to me, they extended to my wife. And then to my wife’s parents. And then to her sisters. And then to the whole family. Until every Fourth of July meant going up to Ron and Ann’s house — all of us, the entire sprawling lot of us — and eating Ron’s ribs on Ron’s back porch and shooting fireworks in Ron’s backyard and feeling, without anyone ever having to say it, like we belonged there.

When I told my sister-in-law Jillian that Ron had passed away, she said something that stopped me. She said, “I’ve known Tony and his parents most of my life.” And she’s right. And I realized: my kids’ version of the Fourth of July, for nearly all of their lives, is Ron Hicks’s house. His food. His backyard. His welcome. He and Ann were the first people we told outside of our parents when Jaime was pregnant with Emaline. Because of course they were.

That’s what Ron did. He opened a door for one of his son’s friends, and he just kept opening it. And he never let it close.

And of course it wasn’t only those Independence Day / Ann Birthday celebrations. It was birthdays and anniversaries and any excuse to get together. And when you got together with Ron, the real treat was that you got to sit and talk with him. You got to hear his stories — about being a cop in Chattanooga back in the day, or being on a boat en route to Cuba with his fellow Marines, or about a great day fishing on the river. And if you were lucky enough to sit between Ron and his brother Lee J when the stories were really getting told, two things were always guaranteed.

Entertainment. And warmth.

I think that’s the thing I will miss the most about Ron. The warmth. The twinkle in his eye when he had a good one to tell. The smile and the outstretched hand every single time I saw him. The welcome that didn’t just extend to one of his son’s friends but to that friend’s wife, his children, his in-laws, his whole family.

Because that’s the man Ron Hicks was. A genuine man and a genuinely good man, who opened his door and never closed it.

He will never not be missed.

https://www.lanefh.com/obituaries/Ronald-Ray-Hicks-Sr?obId=47745858