Pamela Jean Owens off-line

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday evening as cold as tonight is, I answered the phone, seeing an unfamiliar number on the caller i.d., and heard a man ask if I was Dr. Pamela Owens.  I said yes, and was surprised, but not as surprised as I might have expected, when he identified himself as a detective from the police department in Kearney, Nebraska.  He asked if I was by any chance related to a Mr. Ron Davis.

I said, “No, we are not related.  Ron worked for me around the house and yard for the past several years.”

“Ron’s a good man,” I added, “Is he ok?”  I knew Ron carried my phone number in his pocket, and gave it to anyone who wanted to be in touch with him, but the last few times someone had called with a message for him, he never had called to check.  I’d  figured, or at least I’d hoped, that he was doing ok and maybe had settled in for the winter.

Since Ron would never hurt a fly, if the police were calling, I was much more worried something had happened to Ron than any thought that he was in trouble, and I was right.  “Mr. Davis has passed away,” the officer said, “and we are trying to find someone related to him to see about burial and a funeral.”

“Was he out in the cold?  Is that how he died?” I asked, knowing the last I’d heard he was still looking for an apartment.  “No, he had found an apartment and was moved in,” the officer quickly assured me.  “He passed away in his apartment.  Do you know if he had any medical conditions?”

How could I answer that question?  Ron had the medical conditions of a man who couldn’t catch a break.  He looked years older than his age, which I think isn’t far from my own, and he told me once he didn’t even know if he would recognize his own children and grandchildren if he saw them, it had been so long.  I had the sense that once he had been a drinker and probably a smoker, but that must have been a long time ago, because the strongest drink I ever saw him with was a 7-Up or a Dr. Pepper.

He liked his drinks in a paper cup with ice and a straw.  We had that in common.  When he’d work in the yard with me in the hot summers, I’d bring the soft drinks from the house and he would take both of our cups over to the convenience store across the alley and fill them up with ice.  Sometimes I’d drive over to the Sonic and get us both hamburgers and fries, and we’d sit and eat them on the front porch together.  Ron was very neat, always cleaning up after us, always clean and fresh smelling himself, like a man who once had lived a more comfortable life.

I don’t know if he ever lived a comfortable life.  He talked about living in Vegas and working in the music business, that he used to sing and play some instruments.  Sometimes it was hard to tell which stories were memories and which were just long ago dreams.  I know they were all real to Ron, and he spoke of them so much that they were real in my mind as his history.

I never particularly thought of myself as having a “hired man,” but that’s what he was.  He weeded my garden, and raked my leaves, he helped me carry stones from the back and make a path to the curb that wouldn’t get so muddy in the winter.  He checked on me and worried about me if I didn’t answer the phone for a while.  And when he said he’d be over at a certain time to help me, if I showed up a few minutes after that time, I’d know he’d be sitting on my front porch, rocking in my rocking chair.

I couldn’t help the Kearney officer with burying Ron.  I said, if he were in Omaha, I’d certainly be pleased to preach his funeral, but Kearney is a long drive from here, especially in the dead of winter, so I didn’t suggest that I come there.  The only other number in his pocket was a man named John, in Vegas, and I doubted he would know any more about Ron’s family than I did.  I’d talked to John once myself, and he was only a place where Ron had left his car to be fixed when he left Vegas the last time.  Or that’s what Ron told me.

More than once Ron told me I was his only friend, and I guess I was.  He was a good man.  He deserved more friends than just me.  He called me family, that I was like his mother and his sister all rolled into one.  I told the officer I didn’t think Ron looked very good the last time I saw him, when he told me he was leaving Omaha and heading to Kearney to try to live there, where it was smaller and safer.

I do hope he felt safe there.  I hope he chose to die there, because he was safe.  He needed a home, more than he could have just working for me and a few other ladies in Omaha.  He needed the kind of home Warren defined in Frost’s poem, or maybe the one his wife Mary described:

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Ron knew that, in some way or other, we would always find some work for him.  But we couldn’t take him in.  On the other hand, he didn’t have to do anything to deserve having a friend.

It’s another cold Saturday in January.  I’m glad Ron is warm now, at least, and very very safe.

I found this blog item in my documents folder — I can’t quite figure out if I ever posted it.  In the melancholiat at coming to the end of a momentous 2008, personally and for the world, I was feeling rather down, feeling the house too quiet after the holiday bustle of family and a baby once again.  But with so many stars in my sky, how can I not give thanks for my life?  My posting again starts with those who are gone, but it is about life, not death, something I need to daily remind myself to remember:

“Let the dead walk before you and acquaint yourself with their names…”
So speaks the motto splashed boldly across the print Jim Dombrowski gave me of an original poster he created commemorating one of the bloody police massacres of union organizers in labor history.  I do remember those who have walked before me and I endeavor to acquaint myself and others with their names, as my elders taught me to do.   I consider myself to be one of the most fortunate and blessed individuals I know, for the lifetime I have had to sit at the feet and be taught at the knee of such great men and women of social justice history as those with whom I have crossed paths and sometimes shared a day, a week, a month, a year, or more.

Jim Dombrowski — Th.D. Union Seminary, 1920’s sometime — thesis on communistic societies of the early American republic — old line union organizer, North Carolina and throughout the south — beat up and ridden out of town on a rail, countless times and places I’m sure.  C.P. member? Maybe.  Freedom fighter,  Definitely.  Widower, grandfather, lover of justice, of art, of kindness, of life, of family and friends, and of New Orleans.  Mentor to young adult organizers my age, but just as much of budding toddler artists like our little Ruthie.  If I were to “google” Jim today, what would I find?  I wasn’t on-line as I wrote these thoughts, but I’ll check it later.  Would I be as amazed at what I would find about Jim as I was when I “googled” Anne Braden, my old friend, the widow of my primary mentor in organizing, Carl Braden?  I had no idea how widely she was known, being out of the south so long.  Fire brands when I knew them in the seventies, she died not so long ago, respected by all strata of those who love justice.

Anne and Carl were my teachers, my surrogate parents at times; they showed me what parents of activists could be like when I felt far from my own. Carl brought Jim Dombrowski to meet me, interview me, and then go to New York City to raise the money to pay me to organize on the Charolotte Three and the Wilmington Ten.  Carl and Anne were committed to the struggles in North Carolina, in particular, because their own correspondent for the Southern Patriot, Jim Grant, was one of the Black organizers who had been targeted.  And oh, what I learned from Jim, who still lives, as far as I know.

I was blessed to live in the house with T.J. and Vicki Reddy when Julien Bond, then “merely” a poet, came to visit T.J., a fellow poet, in jail.  I was blessed to be sleeping in the apartment whose steps made the platform for the late Allen Ginsberg to do his “after-hours” reading when he came to Vanderbilt University in 1969.  My boy friend’s roommate was Allen’s host, and was sent to buy Allen a toothbrush, since Allen had forgotten his at his last stop.  What little things we remember.  I don’t remember what he read, but I remember that he sat on the stairs as we spilled out of the hallway into the street, because there was no other place to be, and that he waved his hands as he spoke, and that he needed a new toothbrush.  Oh, the importance of poets for our movements.  Denise Levertof, who I never met but who T.J. spoke of as a sister.  So many more.

And the priests — some dead, and some still living, in my life, I’ve known them well.  George Celestian, who took me to hear John Prine in Austin when he had an extra ticket, then soon went to Central America with his order and I don’t know what became of him later.  Tom Sheetz, the Jesuit who was getting a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas so he could vote the Jesuit’s shares in companies such as Gulf and Western, and bring social conscience to the stock holders meetings of large corporations doing evil.  Father Al Moser, Paulist Priest, lover of life and love, gentle soul who told us to name our children something we were comfortable with (when we asked how to do the last name thing), because if they were our children, they would choose their own names when they wanted to anyway.  How right he was!  Still I say the prayer he taught us, “Holy Spirit of God, take me as your disciple. Guide me. Illumine me. Consecrate me.  Be my God.  Be my guide.  Wherever you lead me, I will go.  Whatever you say, I will do.  Whatever you forbid, I will abhore.  Lead me then, into the fullness of your truth.” I think I may have a few of the words wrong, but more or less correctly, that has been my prayer for the past thirty plus years.  Father Al Moser, I don’t know whether you live now on earth or in heaven, but I appreciate you and thank God for your being in my life.

Father Joe Znotas.  The stories I could tell . . . . Another day, another blogging.  We named our first son for you.  That says it all. I strive always to do what I think you would do in any situation of daily life, for you taught me more than anyone that the real work for justice is in the minutes and the hours, not in the campaigns and the headlines.  You died too young.  You are sorely missed.

I am thankful that Angela Davis and I crossed paths for a few days in North Carolina, shared a bedroom in Professor Helen Otho’s home, sat through a trial together and spoke on the same rally platform.  I learned from you, my tall black sister, and I think perhaps you learned from me as well, though I will probably never know.  I saw you vulnerable, soon after you had been those many months in solitary confinement in jail, for no reason, innocent but held anyway, with no blankets but the ones they let you crochet to pass the time, with poor food, for you were a vegetarian, with nothing but time to think, to meditate, possibly even to pray.  I wondered if you, an avowed Communist, were truly an atheist.  You seemed full of the spirit to me.

Some are dead: Elizabeth Chavis.  Igal Rodenko. My grand parents.  My Aunt Maude. Rachel Henderlite. John Jansen.
And some are living:  Ralph DiGia.  David McReynolds, Karl, Judith, Walter Harrelson, Martin Marty, James Gustafson, David Tracey, Anthony Yu, Prescott Williams, Bob Shelton.  In my life, I’ve loved them all.

I have roots.  I have a base to stand on and a reservoir of wisdom to tap and call upon.  I have never gone out into the world alone, even when I knew no one in the room, for the cloud of witnesses behind me are always with me.  The cloud of witnesses is not just a pretty platitude from the epistle to the Hebrews; it is reality and I feel it daily, hourly, minute by minute.

I am so very very blessed by those I have known, loved, and been loved by.  How, then, can I want for anything?