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.