Mourning the death of world's most cheerful man

(655 words)

I’ve lately been waking up angry Dick Guenther taught me to drive when I was 16.

I wish Dick Guenther hadn’t taught me to drive until I was 50.

I was thinking this as I was listening to loved ones memorialize this truly great man on Saturday at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park near his Castle Shannon home.

See, I was just so stupid when I was 16. Stubborn, selfish, sass-prone — and those are just the character flaws that begin with the letter “s.”

Val asked me why my own old man didn’t teach me that rite of passage. I don’t know. Maybe Dad didn’t have the patience, thought we’d clash or maybe he didn’t want the obligation to cut into his bar time.

Like father, like son!

Or maybe he wanted his impressionable young son to spend one-on-one time with one of the most kind, cheerful, generous and loving men any of us have known. Dick and his surviving wife Bernice were two of my parents’ dearest friends.

Guenther, 92, was a retired postal carrier whose route included Willow Avenue in Shannon. Tony’s Barber Shop was on Willow. It’s where Dad used to take Eric and I for buzzcuts when we were kids.

Our visits, it seemed, always coincided with Dick’s daily delivery. More than four decades later, I remember the details still. 

He'd spring through the door like his blood was carbonated. He’d razz Tony, Tony’d razz back. They’d belittle Pirate pitching from the previous night’s game. Some local politics would be disparaged and, boom, like that he’d be gone. You could hear him resuming his chipper whistling before the door even closed behind him. The whole conversational tornado lasted fewer than 40 seconds.

In its windy wake were smiles. I believe we can truly take soulful nourishment just by observing a happy person living their happy lives.

Guenther was the reason I became so confused when the term “going postal” began to signify workplace violence.

How could anybody who wore the same uniform as Dick Guenther ever have a bad day?

It’s my understanding Guenther’d had only one bad day his entire life. He was visiting France when some strangers tried to kill him.

They were Germans. It was about a month after D-Day. Had I been there, I’d have said, “Whoa! You can’t kill Dick Guenther! This war is the reason the world needs men like him. And he has so much left to do. He’s going to raise three wonderful children and dote on more generations of grandchildren.

“Now, put down those weapons and let’s talk this all out. Who needs a glass of lemonade?”

I hadn’t seen his son, Danny, in nearly forty years. We had a good hug. He said he couldn’t remember ever hearing his Dad complain about anything in his entire life.

I told him I’d found four things to complain about just crossing the church parking lot.

I’m not kidding when I say I regret he taught me to drive when I was 16. Being a bone-headed young fool, I’m sure I asked this truly great man questions about the finer points of parallel parking, proper braking distance and what to do when the lights on the stupid school bus blink red.

Had I been older, more seasoned, more aware, I’d have asked him the really important questions about just how he did it all.

How in this world of hurt and hate did he remain so cheerful? How did he make the daily joy and well-being of others his life’s priority over his own? Did he ever have any idea how inspirational he was being just by being so happy?

Dick Guenther teaching a snotty 16 year old kid how to drive just seems like a blatant squandering of a magnificent natural resource.

He’s a man who could have taught the whole world how to fly.

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Of death and dreams

Valerie woke up Saturday morning and told me she had a dream that our neighbor had died.

I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d dreamed, much as I have every night since I was 14, about having sex, getting rich or having sex with somebody rich.

Well, by noon that day, one of our dreams had come true. Care to guess which one?

Now heaven has a friendly handyman who’ll fix the broken lawnmowers, silence the squeaky doors and dispense the folk wisdom that help tenderfoots get through an unusually harsh winter -- and let’s save the debate about heavenly meteorology and lawns that need mown for another time.

Old Bill is dead.

We’d known him for just the two years since we moved up into the woods near him and we’re the poorer because we didn’t move next to him about 15 years ago.

The mystifying realms of death and dreams forever fascinate. Why they seem to so often intersect only deepens the mystery.

The specifics of her dream vanished with her waking, she said. Left were the remnants of a strong feeling that death had stopped by the neighborhood. The nonexistent activity in the always still house next door betrayed nothing.

Then it was like a local version of the Abbey Road album cover sprang to life and marched into Bill’s house. There was the ambulance driver, the police officer, the clergy and, finally, the undertaker who took the remains of our old friend away.

I had I guess what you’d call a premonition the night before my own father died.

His father Archibald Rodell, had died in a Pittsburgh veteran’s hospital in 1938 as a latent result of being gassed by the Kaiser's henchmen in World War I. He spent the last years of his life gazing longingly from the windows of a sterile tuberculosis ward and writing achingly beautiful poems about the 10-year-old boy waving up from the lawn on the other side of the glass and the games of catch they’d never get to play.

For some reason, I’d taken that book of poems home with me after a Sunday visit and read each and every one of them. Even though there was no physical clues that the next day would be Dad’s last, I cried and cried and cried.

Was his father preparing me, a grandson he’d never met, for the profound shock that I’d never see my father again? Was he trying to tell me that he and my 76-year-old father would be playing a long overdue game of catch? Why did I pick up that book of poems on that night after years of neglecting to pay it any mind?

It wasn’t a real long shot that Bill, 82, was on his way out. His last six months seemed to have been a slow torture. Val and the kids would take him cookies and gifts on the holidays and see him pitifully slumped on the sofa, too weak to answer the door, but considerate enough to give a friendly wave of acknowledgment.

He lived alone and his driveway became a constant parade of angelic family and caregivers to provide hospice to someone who’d decided to go out on his own terms.

It was only a matter of time.

It’s impossible for me to grasp the finality of death, the enormity of heaven, the wonder of meeting Jesus and if a guy who still dreams about having sex with rich people even warrants admission.

For me, heaven will be heavenly if I get there and the first two people I see are my Dad and his father waiting to greet me.

And that one of them hands me a mitt.