Life’s physical absolutes are birth and death. You can’t have one without the other. What occurs in between is what matters most.
The older I get, the more often I find a friend’s name in the obituary column. I seldom grieve, unless the death came at far too young an age, cutting short the life of a person who still had much to give. Others, on a precipitous decline that becomes steeper by the day, are another story.
Lawrence Dietrich died last month at 88, following a life well lived.
Lawrence was a good friend, a relationship honed in great measure from two weeks of conversation each December in his garage behind a frame farmhouse southeast of Humboldt, where he was born and lived most of his life.
During deer season, I’d set up shop at the edge of a pasture to watch a crop field, usually laced with freshly cut soybeans. Deer flocked there morning and evening to graze on stubble and beans knocked from pods and scattered during harvest.
Usually I quit my stand — right or wrong often the cab of my now 24-year-old pickup to ward off the cold — and crawled over a rough oilfield lane back to a county road, entering half a mile or so south of Lawrence’s place. Seldom was he not in the garage, perched on an old chair and frequently sipping on a cold one — 3.2, if you please, fetched from an old fridge nearby. I usually imbibed — out of social grace, don’t you know.
I’d report on what I’d seen and pick his brain for deer sightings. Lawrence walked every day, for fitness and entertainment, along the same rock road that was my approach, and mentally kept track of bucks he’d seen.
We talked about many things. Of him and wife Delpha, who died in 2011, scooting down to Chanute on Saturday nights to dance. About his days in the Pacific as a Seabee — what else with his mechanical skills? About fish he pulled from the Neosho, some of which found their ways into a big stockwater pond southwest of his house to be re-caught, mainly by kids.
Most of all, he liked to talk about his children, grandchildren and great-grands, four of whom just happen to be my grandkids. We had mutual interest.
A life well-lived? You bet. He didn’t solve any monumental medical problems, delve into personal politics or become a captain of industry. He just lived and loved and accumulated a huge number of friends during his time on earth.
What more can one ask?
Another friend meets his maker
