CATEGORY: METZGER

Dick Day was one of the best looking men I have ever known.  He was six foot three, with dark hair and brown eyes.  He was married to Audrey, who was also very good looking.  Audrey was also a lovely person.  I had met her at the Martha Washington Hotel when we both lived there.

I had not met Dick when he was courting Audrey, but I had seen him waiting for her in the lobby.  Who wouldn’t have noticed Dick?!  I only learned about their courtship later.  It had been a stormy one.  She was engaged to someone else, but when she was waiting for her fiance to pick her up, Dick would come by and talk her into just going out and getting into his car “to talk,” and then he would drive off with her.  After one or two of these episodes, she refused to see him anymore, but then he would wait for her outside the place where she worked and coerce her into going out with him.  Finally he wore her down and she married him.  It wasn’t long before they had five children.  They bought a house just a few blocks from us in Metzger.  That was when I met him.  The four of us became friendly; we visited back and forth and our children played together.  They only had two children then, but as more came along, Audrey became busier and busier and we saw them less and less.

Then Dick started stopping by during the day time to visit with me.   He was always very circumspect and friendly as if we had grown up together.  Maybe because my best childhood friends (James and Harry Hartley) were boys, I felt comfortable with this.  The two of us developed a unique relationship, a crazy rapport.  He was a successful salesman of restaurant supplies–a charming manipulator.  However, he was never insincere.  Is that possible?  He loved to play with people’s heads–to talk them around what they believed in or thought about things.  He was never pushy, but he would ask leading questions, suggest other possibilities.  At that time, I was a Christian and very religious.  He had enough bible knowledge to be able to catch me up, and I wouldn’t know how to answer him.  He made me study harder, and eventually I started asking myself more searching questions and going farther afield for answers.

He would stop by maybe once a week, maybe once a month.  I am sure some people thought we were having an affair, but I can’t remember our ever even touching hands.  We were just good friends in a back handed sort of way.  Actually we were sparring partners.  He was so good looking that I loved to insult him–about his looks, about his mentality, about his receding hair, about his morals (with no cause), about anything I could think of.  I was actually mean to him, but in a witty sort of way.  Well, I liked to think I was being witty, but I was not always witty.  Sometimes I was just rude.  He never got angry.  He actually loved it.  Our verbal interactions were such fun!  I was very immature back then.  It never occurred to me that, if Dick had extra time on his hands, he should be at home helping Audrey, any more than, when I was a child, I would have thought James and Harry should be at home helping their parents.  I was just, secretly, delighted to see him whenever he came by.

Basically, Dick liked to talk, and he was always interested and amazed at what I was doing to our house.  He could hardly believe that I was doing the work myself and with such pleasing results.  He called me an artist.  I loved that but would never admit it.  Once he came by when I was digging out the dirt from under the house in preparation for adding a foundation.  I heard a car in the driveway and started crawling out.  When he knocked on the door, I called out, “I’m under here!”  He must have thought it was a voice from the center of the earth.  He came questionally around the house just as I was wallowing out from under spitting dirt and angle worms.  He started laughing.  He said, “WHAT are you DOING?”  I said, “This is where I bury people who come by early in the morning expecting coffee and doughnuts!”  He had never expected me to serve him any kind of refreshment.  I didn’t drink coffee and never EVER offered him anything to drink.

My house plans were not the only ones we talked about.  Dick was remodeling his own house and I was just as interested in his plans as he was in mine.  Sometimes he would sketch them for me.  I was also interested in his plans for a farm he had purchased but to which he had not moved.  He was always rather vague about this farm, and I never knew whether he really owned it or not.  If he did own it, I wondered why he didn’t move there, since with his kind of work, he could live any place he wanted in the Portland area.  Sometimes I thought he had invented it just as bait to get me going, because he knew I loved farms.  He told me there were three silos on this farm set in a triangle, and that he thought it would be fun to make the tops of the three of them into a place to live, because there was a wonderful view from up there.  He said that he would connect them with a deck.

I got so excited about that idea!  I kept asking him questions.  I started getting possessive as if it were my own place.  Secretly, I designed the silo house.  I drew three circles that I guessed were about the right size for silos and did a plan.  I positioned the main floor two stories down from the top so each silo could have a second floor overlooking the floor below.  There were also wonderful pop-out bay windows hanging off the sides and a partial geodesic roof over the decked area.  I had this plan for a long time, and when I actually was going to show it to him, casually bringing up the subject in preparation, he said that he was thinking of selling that place.  I was acutely let down and never did show him the design I had done.

I don’t know how many years this went on, not the conversation about the farm, but his coming to visit.  Then one day, after I had not seen him for a really long time, he came to the back door.  That in itself was unusual; always before he had come to the front door.  The back door had a window in it; I was in the kitchen and I saw him through the window.  He didn’t look like the Dick I knew.  He looked terrible.  As I moved toward the door I was forming things to say in my mind, like: “Did you get lost on your way to the emergency room?” or even something as mild as “Do you need a shave and a haircut?”, But when I opened the door, I actually didn’t say anything derogatory.  When he really did look ghastly, it wasn’t any fun to say so.  But I did ask what had happened to him.

He told me that he had to have some teeth out.  He told me a lot of other things.  He had bought a tavern down near the Willamette River below Barbur Boulevard.  I think it was on Macadam Avenue.  He had to spend a lot of time there managing it, even though he was still working at his other job.  He had gotten into a fight with someone in the tavern, hit this person in the mouth, and his hand had gotten infected when it was cut by the man’s tooth.  He had to have a finger removed.  That same person had also hit him in the mouth and knocked out one or more of his teeth.  This was so unlike Dick, that I couldn’t really comprehend it.  I sat down at the kitchen table and didn’t say a word.  This was so unlike me that he couldn’t comprehend it.

He went on to say that he had, or would have to have, expensive dental work done.  Maybe the dentist hadn’t done the work yet, and his face was caved in where there were no teeth.  At any rate the shape of his lower face was altered.  I had never thought that the way anyone looked really mattered, but I discovered that the way Dick looked really did matter.  It was so much a part of his persona.  I started feeling sorry for him, and how can you have sparring sessions with someone you feel sorry for?

He was busy with his tavern, so I seldom saw him after that.  He seemed changed, and not for the better.  I even suspected that he had become involved with some pretty shady characters.  I could imagine this in an innocent Damon Runyan-like non-judgmental way since Dick, like Runyon, was always fascinated by off-beat people (probably why he liked me) and never judgmental of anyone.  From some little hints of things he said, I started wondering if he were “sleeping around,” as we used to unkindly and speculatively say.  Then I started wondering if I were the one who was being judgmental.

Then Eric and Jari and I moved to Tumalo, and that was the end of my seeing Dick.  But Dick cared about Eric.  He was always like a second father to him.  After we moved to Eugene, Eric decided to move back to Metzger and live with his father.  I wrote to Dick and asked him to look out for Eric, because Howard liked to drink and had a nasty temper.  Dick became protective toward Eric, almost making him a member of his own family.  So then Dick and I heard about each other through Eric.

Dick died of cancer in 1990, when he was in his mid sixties, but I did see him one last time.  About 1985, when I was living in Port Townsend, he called me.  He said he was spending a few days in Seattle and asked if I would come over the next evening so he could take me out to dinner.

I was ecstatic at the thought of seeing him again.  We had dinner in a very nice restaurant.  Afterwards we went into the bar and sat sipping drinks until my ferry left about 10:30.  I still hardly ever drank, so sipping is the right word here.  He seemed like the old Dick.  We talked on and on without my once thinking it was necessary to put him down.  Our sparring days were over, and it felt good to just converse.  He joked with the cocktail waitress, telling her that I was his long lost love and we were having a rendezvous.  He kept telling me how great it was to see me and how good I looked.  He looked good too.  He looked wonderful.  His face had filled out. I’m pretty sure that meant new teeth.  Whatever the reason, he looked much better than the time I had seen him through the window of the kitchen door.

Dick was always unique in that he didn’t just like to talk about himself as so many men do, but also about the person he was talking to.  HE ASKED QUESTIONS!  What a novel idea!  He listened!  He wanted to know everything about my life–all about what I was doing.  He said he was not surprised that I had gotten a degree in architecture and that I was now making a living designing buildings and doing remodeling.  He said he just wondered why I had not done it sooner.  He told me all about his own life.  When I asked, “Do you still have the farm with the three silos?” he said, “No, I sold it.”  Then I confessed to him about the plan I had done.  I think I expected him to laugh and then maybe tell me that he had never really owned that farm at all, but instead he started asking me questions.  He wanted to know exactly what I had drawn and had me sketch it out on a napkin.  That made me wonder if perhaps he had been telling the truth and really had owned it after all.

Once I asked Eric if Dick had ever owned a farm with three silos in a triangle.  He said there were three such silos on the farm that was right next to the farm Dick had purchased for his son.  He said maybe Dick had owned it at one time, but he didn’t know for sure.  So I’ll never know, but that imaginative flight into silo-land has caused me ever since to look appraisingly at the tops of any silo I might see, and at the tops of old grain elevators in places like Kent and Shaniko, and wonder if they are available. Old elevators are even better than silos because they have—well, elevators!

I can’t remember my parting with Dick that night in Seattle.  I can’t even remember if he walked me to my car, or to the ferry since I probably left my car in Winslow.  That was the last I saw him or heard from him.

Of all the people in my life, Dick stands out as totally unique.  It is so grand to have such a personality to remember–especially to remember as an oh-so-interesting friend.