The obit of some friends' son-in-law:
It's Wednesday night, and Lavonte Jackson walks off the basketball court and sees the obituary on the second-floor door.
"I don't believe that," Jackson, 23, says, as he examines the picture. "I played with him. If he were here, he would know me. He would always shake my hand after the game."
Paul Gilgo knew almost every basketball player at the Dowd YMCA and almost every basketball player knew him. Gilgo had been coming to the gym since the 1980s. He was 6-foot-3, ran the court relentlessly and had a sweet shot he didn't have to be talked into taking.
He played for keeps. He called the woman he would marry on their first date to say he'd be late. After taking an elbow through his lower lip, he was in the emergency room.
Kelly Gilgo became accustomed to such calls. Three times Paul went to the ER with a broken nose.
The call she received the evening of Dec. 6 is one to which nobody will become accustomed. Paul, 45, had been killed in an auto accident.
The vice president of sales for Reflex Security, he left for Atlanta that Monday. He was driving down Interstate85 in his maroon 1996 Volvo, the floor likely covered with its usual array of hamburger wrappers, Styrofoam coffee cups and a plastic bag full of dank gym clothes. He had planned to leave early, but snuck in one last lunchtime game at the Y.
At about 8:40 p.m. he crossed the median in Banks County, about 60 miles north of Atlanta. A semi-tractor trailer hit him, and a second tractor-trailer was caught up in the wreck. Neither of the other drivers was hurt.
Kelly had to tell their children, Andrew, 8, Grace, 5, and Evan, 3, about their father's death.
Shane Hummell, who runs the basketball programs at the Y, had to tell Gilgo's friends.
Hummell walked to the middle of Keith Gym. The game stopped and players gathered around him. Then the loud gym turned silent. Some players left. Some sat on the wooden benches. Some played.
"But it was like a game out of the 1940s," says CB. "Nobody was calling any fouls."
Paul is Paul G at the Y because that's what he wrote on the sign-up sheet to distinguish himself from other Pauls. Some men who, for more than a decade, had fought with and against him for rebounds didn't know his last name.
They answer here to John V, Jim B, JD, Bax, Carl, Stu, Shaq, Spider and CB. CB looks through the Plexiglass at the end of the court and expects to see Paul G doing curls while waiting his chance to play.
Paul G was vital. That's why it's so unfathomable that he's gone. He played so hard that Kelly, 36, refused to watch. She saw him play only once. She tried to talk him into playing at the Siskey YMCA, a quick drive from their house.
"But he said no," says Kelly. "He said the greatest pick-up ball in the city is at the Dowd Y."
Paul G played hard but he played right. He didn't belittle lesser players. If his teammates weren't hustling, or made a joke of it, he'd walk off in the middle of a game. He'd learn details about the players he had drawn so they would feel less like strangers and more like a team.
"Other people say they don't bring the job home," says Kelly. "Paul never did."
Whatever frustrations he had, he left them, along with pieces of his nose, on the court.
CB says if he had $50 for every game he played with Paul he'd have $500,000. He knew every nuance of Paul G's game.
But he didn't know that Paul G hugged his kids when he walked in the door. He didn't know that he told Kelly every night that he loved her.
He didn't know that Paul G and Kelly, who rarely went out, recently saw "The Notebook." Paul G cried as hard as she did. It's probably good that CB didn't know that.
Kelly says she never encountered anybody Paul met in sales, and he had been in sales more than 20 years. When they met somebody, the name usually ended in an initial.
The guys with the initials show up everywhere. Paul G spent the night at his church, St. Stephen United Methodist, as part of the Room at the Inn program. One of the homeless men who visited that night was a Y regular. What do you say?
"Hey, man," is what Paul G said. They were equals. When you've repeatedly forced your tired bodies down court for a 2-on-1 fast break, status no longer applies.
CB went to a banker's holiday party and right away was asked what he did for a living.
"If I told you, would you pretend that you cared?" CB asked the woman.
At the Y, nobody asks. Whether your collar is white, the skin beneath your fingernails black, your politics, red or blue, matters not. Can you play? Do you hustle? That's the currency.
There are mats and step-benches on the edge of Keith Gym, and on the wall is a sign that insists on appropriate language. Each basket is a point, games are to 11 and there's a 12-minute time limit. Losers walk.
Paul G played in Keith games and in games around the corner in the Y's Underwood Gym, where the men tend to be younger and encounters above the rim more frequent. Paul G was one of the few older guys able to slip seamlessly from one to the other.
Beneath Paul G's obituary is the message: A GOOD MAN...A GOOD FRIEND...Y B-BALLERS. Some players already have sent money to the recreational fund at Paul G's church, where he coached. They plan to hold a tournament in his name.
I did a small favor for Paul G last year, getting tickets at cost through a friend so he could take his older son to the Carolina-Washington football game. A few weeks ago, Paul walked up to say that Andrew still talks about it, and he thanked me again.
Paul G was a friend. You had to like him. Had to. He was gracious and kind and sufficiently handsome that, had he broken his nose a fourth time, he still would have looked good.
December is a terrible time for a tragedy.
"But this is not about grieving," says Kelly.
Paul G was respected and loved, as hundreds of basketball players, some with tears in their eyes, will attest.
"What a legacy," says Hummell.
"He was one of the good guys," says basketball player Jim B. "You hate to see this happen to anybody, but it's terrible when it happens to one of the good guys."
The good guy leaves a wife and three children.
The Gilgo Children Scholarship Fund has been established in their name. You can contribute in care of Central Carolina Bank, Kings Drive Branch, 101 S. Kings Dr., Charlotte, N.C. 28204.
You're probably wondering why, on Dec. 24, I'm coming to you with this.
Had you known Paul G, I suspect that you'd be coming to me.