We respected each other. I think that's why our friendship worked. Linda was pregnant with Nate and having problems with the pregnancy; all the driving she did wasn't helping. She was crying as she pulled into the Minute Man station on North Main, and Dick, the manager asked what was wrong. She told him the doctor told her it was either her job or her baby, and she didn't know how we could make it without her job. I was working part time at the little EUB church in Alma, but by itself, it wasn't enough. Dick had a list of applicants that took up a whole sheet of paper, but he leaned in and told her to send me down. He hired me on the spot, forty hours a week.
Dick stood about six-three and weighed about 250. He was pushing fifty, while I was twenty-two. His life and mine were two separate worlds that intersected that day. He told me he'd been everywhere he wanted to go, seen everything he wanted to see, done everything he wanted to do. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and womanized like a rabbit. Until he met Mabel, that is. Oh...he had once served as a bodyguard for someone in the Mafia. Yep, we were cut from different cloth. That first day on the job, he called me over, stood toe to toe, looking down at me chin to nose. "Here's how it works," he said. "You don't try to convert me, and I won't try to convert you." OK, we understood each other!
I did my job the best I could do, back when we actually pumped gas, checked oil, and cleaned windshields. He was as profane as ever, I worked hard, and we got along just fine. I buried his little baby when she was stillborn, and when Nate was born in the middle of the Flood of '72, It was Dick who made picked his way through the rock falls on Stony Lonesome Road to lend us his big Olds 88 convertible to get to the hospital in Olean. We sort of lost touch when I went away to seminary, but some five or six years later after we had moved back to Western New York, one day I received a call from Mabel. Dick was in Olean hospital, the cancer slowly sucking the life out of him. I drove the two hours to see him, and did it again and again. Before he died, he prayed to receive Christ. He didn't convert me, and I didn't convert him. Jesus did that.
I learned a lot from Dick, about loyalty, honor, and friendship. As I remember those years of working with Dick, I remember a man who even before those final days had one of the biggest hearts I've ever known. If he liked you, there's nothing he wouldn't do for you. He regularly took in wayward kids, gave of his time and whatever he had to help anyone in need. He was tough and coarse, but I think I scared him the day I told him he was closer to the Kingdom of God than he would find comfortable. Turns out, I was right, and tonight as I reminisce, I am grateful for it. There's a lot I don't know about eternity, but I believe I'll see him again. I'm looking forward to it. Till then, every time I think of Dick, I see him the morning he showed up at my front door, keys in hand, telling me to grab Linda and get her to the hospital before the roads closed. Friends like that are few and far between. I've been blessed with a fistful of them, and am grateful. Whatever I've been able to do for them is minuscule compared to what they have given me.
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