A Story Unfinished

It was cold and wet that day in March, cold for the area around Phoenix anyways and wet for most any time in the Sonoran Desert. The dark, almost black, clouds trimmed with white, loosely bunched and racing east across the sky seemed hell-bent on being somewhere else and the sooner the better. Still they came from the west that morning as I drove north out of Phoenix and headed to New River, my mood sharing the emotions of the sky, dark with only a bit of something less so around the edge.

The invitation had been made, the kind that says if you’re around sometime stop in, and so that day I’d decided I’d “be around” and see if he was there. I wanted to talk, I wanted someone to listen and I wanted him to talk so that I might listen and learn. He knew things, I was comfortable around him and I knew that he would listen.

On that day the clouds never stopped their race across the sky, the rain would start, then stop then sometimes simply drip and drizzle enough to watch big drops fall from the roof and splat on the ground with a steady rhythmic beat. He was busy getting ready for more of what he did so well, telling his stories and singing his songs, but he took the time, made some coffee, talked and most of all for me on that day he shared a kindness of one man in the company of another who simply sat and listened.

I left that cozy little house with a horse out back that day better than the weather around me. I drove away from that place that had become a shelter from my storms if only for a couple hours feeling that though I hadn’t found all my answers I’d been heard and maybe, just maybe, there was hope in tomorrow after all.

We’d never been close and we would never be close but it was a relationship where if he’d have ever picked up the phone I’d have been there. The man I knew was a good man and a man worth the helping if or when he needed it, no questions asked. That’s what you do when you call someone friend. But, like so many he kept much close in and so there never was a call and I never got to return the favor he’d shown me so many years before.


We’d just reconnected; he’d written me a couple emails that had shared a bit of his journey over the past years and in his last note he’d mentioned about a trail he’d like to go “poking his nose into” as he put it and thought maybe we could try it out. Of course there were perfectly fine reasons why I couldn’t make it just then but I’d kept thinking about it and thinking of what a great adventure it might be just spending a day, two maturing men hiking a trail out Perryville Mesa way and just seeing what he meant when he talked about “poking his nose” into a place. I knew I’d learn some things and I knew there’d be new stories but like I said, there were other things that really needed being done, or so I thought.

And now I find myself wondering if perhaps that was the phone call I’d been waiting for.


A voice has gone silent; a voice that once sang and laughed and told stories to countless children and adults. And God the songs that voice would sing and the stories that voice would tell. I want to believe there should have been more for the telling.

I will miss you Dennis Richard Freeman.