"A Moment of SILENCE! Please."

My buddy The Congratulator was an auto mechanic in Ipswich. He was also, as one or two of you might reason from his name, the world's biggest fan of Congratulations, both the word and the gesture. He loved to congratulate people, he lived for it, and he loved to be congratulated. If your morning paper arrived on time, before you'd settled down for your cereal and juice, Congratulations! If it arrived on time and with every section and insert in the proper order, well then, Congratulations again! If it arrived on time, with every section and insert in the proper order, and completely dry because the paperboy placed it inside your screen door instead of on the doormat, which was wet because it had rained the night before, then--you guessed it--Hey! Congratulations! Three for three! Alriiiiight!

The Congratulator was smitten. He loved the sound of the word congratulations. He loved the emotions its utterance inspired in those to whom it was directed. And he loved the camaraderie, the support, and the intimacy among people that its mere existence implied. "The degree of civilization in a society," he once said, channeling Dostoevsky," is reflected in the willingness of its people to congratulate each other."

I once saw The Congratulator faint dead away, like one of those famous fainting goats, when shown the word "Congratulations!" written on a cocktail napkin. If you ever wanted to fuck him up in a game of H-O-R-S-E, you could congratulate him, before he shot, on his flawless shooting mechanics: "Hey, man. You've got a great shot. You've been working at it. I can tell. Congratulations!" And his next shot wouldn't even sniff the hoop. If you ever wondered what cards he was holding in a heated game of Fan Tan, same thing: congratulate him on something silly like his choice of black leather shoes, which "perfectly match the ace of spades," and he'd tip his hand long and low as he swooned while the word swept through his body. It was a liability, I know, to love something as much as he did, but I'd have traded the world to feel that feeling just once. No one alive felt love the way he did.

I write of my friend The Congratulator in the past tense because, alas, The Congratulator is dead. He died on Monday, viewing trencherwomen.com, reading all of the comments that had been posted about the participants in Saturday's contests. "Congratulations to Joey on the win!" read one posted by Bubba Yarbrough about the asparagus festival in Stockton. "Congratulations Joey. Great Job!" read another posted by Wills. And while Bob Shoudt deserves some credit for avoiding the word "congratulations" in his epic comment about Myrtle Beach's Steeplechase, his overall effusiveness and selflessness--a tacit congratulations--did very little to actually help matters. In all, I think there were four or five messages of congratulations posted on the site that day, far too many for The Congratulator's excitable heart to take. The coroner who performed his autopsy said that his heart exploded.

"Like how?" I asked him over finger sandwiches at the memorial. "Like a big bomb?"

"No," he said. "Like fireworks. Like happy fireworks on the Fourth of July."

To you guys, to you gracious, careless, free-firing plaudits (Bubba, Wills, Bob, etc.), Congratulations! You've gone and killed a decent man.