There was a time when my father visited Ballard several times a year, traveling from Boston. He was recently retired after 28 years with the Federal Reserve Bank and my mother was particularly motivated to offer his services to me.

She dispatched Herb if I so much as lamented that I couldn’t fit in an oil change for my Honda.

My father likes to be needed, although I doubt he would ever use those words. But his help was invaluable; starting with his first solo visit two weeks after my husband died of Hodgkin’s Disease.

With a toddler and a dying cat, everything was a crisis, from finding an estate attorney to mailing memorial invitations.

Herb came and went throughout the years. He was known to everyone on the block, with his perpetual cup of 7-11 coffee and small, white rental cars.

In the morning he was at Hiram Chittendam Locks when they unlocked the gate. Evenings he would stand outside smoking cigars the only greeter for my next-door neighbor when she returned home after closing her salon.

He was willing to take extra children to the zoo and distribute donuts. Everybody knew Herb.

Gradually he upgraded to coffee from the QFC on 24th Northwest, along with the 49-cent maple bar. He would wait outside the old library for the librarians to unlock the doors and was in competition with another retiree for first dibs on The New York Times.

He found a grammatical error at the Ballard Community Center, so he used a Band-Aid to add an apostrophe to Children’s Playground.

He supervised the first Fourth of July block party and mowed my neighbor’s lawn even as another neighbor mowed mine. The crises had waned but Ballard was a second home to him, a fact that my mother appreciated.

He seemed hurt when I gave his room in the basement to a student in exchange for babysitting. His visits tapered off. I had to summon him especially when Emily was Duke Theseus in a fifth grade production of "Midsummer Night’s Dream" at Salmon Bay.

There was no sense of finality to that 2002 visit. Herb didn’t die; he just stopped traveling. He was never comfortable on long flights; his hip got worse.

Perhaps it was something as simple as the inconvenience of removing his shoes at airport security, or unfamiliarity with self check-in. Herb may have felt his work was done in Seattle; the Band-Aid in place at the playground; Emily on her way to middle school.

When a neighbor asked if my father was unwell I reported it to him by way of a joke. It had only been two years, and we saw him back east every summer. Then Emily graduated from eighth grade and went to high school.

“The neighbors are worried about you,” I told my father. I started to count on a second hand the years it had been since he visited. Obviously stronger threats or a bigger event were warranted. Emily’s high school graduation would have to do.

My mother booked the airline tickets one night after Herb was asleep. In advance of the visit he hand-typed one of his letters to us.

“I am particularly looking forward to seeing my old friend at the QFC bakery and then going across the street to your cozy library.”

Was he really unaware of the changes? Finally he tipped his hat.

“It is always good to catch up on Seattle news with the P-I.”

He’d had a hip replacement since his last visit and I’d had moved a half-mile west. True to form, his only comments on the new home addressed the increased number of steps to the front door.

He would walk around to the back door rather than go down the stairs. He said the only things on his list for the week were to see if Lombardi’s still served roasted garlic and boats still went through the Locks. But he was spotted frequently driving up the old block.

Herb’s sense of Ballard returned more each day as he recalled all those former errands – Ernst runs, the Secret Garden visits, post office drops and various playgrounds. He found his way back to Golden Gardens and the Locks.

He avoided parking pay stations and parked at Bartells instead. He drove half a block to the coffee shop and complained about the price of maple bars. Every day he asked Walter if the coffee was fresh, as though in denial about the difference between an Americano and old-fashioned drip.

The former neighbors made it over to see Herb as four of the children he’d teased on the street and ferried to the zoo graduated one by one from three different high schools. “He’s gotten so tiny,” almost all of them remarked, but perhaps the difference is in us.

Ballard has gotten so much bigger in the last seven years that some blocks are no longer recognizable. The streetscape has changed. Perhaps we all seem smaller in comparison.

“Are you really going to graduate,” he asked his first-born granddaughter. “Are there really going to be cherries on this tree?” he asked about the new backyard.

After Herb left, the recycling bin reeked of cigars and I had to dig out the plastic wrappers from the yard waste. In seven years the trash containers have changed.

The Burke Gilman trail has gotten closer, but the gardens at the Locks are more beautiful than ever. Rainier cherries appeared at the Farmer’s Market and I looked carefully at our tree to see if Herb had planted ripe cherries as a joke.

That’s exactly the kind of humor Herb used to visit upon us frequently - before we got so big and he got so small.