Touched By Two Deaths

 

This past week I learned about the deaths of two old friends: Father Ted Metzger and Tom Dietz. 

They were not friends who had been active parts of my life recently (for various reasons), but they were friends who had been important in my life around the same time, and who affected me in ways that touch me still.

I first met Father Metzger in 1976. I was in the college seminary at the time, and I needed a place to stay for the summer. He agreed to let me live in the rectory of the parish where he was pastor.

I had a job as a security guard working an afternoon/evening shift, he was taking classes, so during the week we had little interaction. But on the weekends we talked.

He was a gentle, caring person, and I needed that at the time as I struggled with whether or not to continue in the seminary. He listened, asked questions, but didn't push. I did ultimately leave the seminary, but it was my choice and he helped me to understand why I made that choice.

We also shared a love of old movies. We talked about them, and he even introduced me to Gone With the Wind, which, at that time, was playing in theaters, and which I had never seen before.

In addition, he allowed me to join the small "folk group" that played at Mass at his parish. I had never really played in public before (other than one joke performance in high school). Although I only played with the group for a few months, it led me into liturgical music, something I've continued doing in one form or another for more than 40 years (including my current involvement with Rock of Faith). The leader of the group also wanted to form a group to play more secular folk music at coffee houses. We practiced, I learned a good deal, and we did play out once - the first time I ever played in public (other than at church).

During the down times when Father wasn't there and I wasn't working, I did a lot of reading and writing. The rectory was topped by a cupola - a small room on top of the roof sometimes called a "widow's walk"  or "widow's watch." I used to go up there, and remembering the legend that these small rooms were where the wives of sailors would go to watch the sea to see if their husbands were coming home, I wrote what became my first published poem:

The Widow's Walk

A sail!

The young trip as they run.
The old curse their stiffness.
And all eyes turn to the sea
as on the widow's walk they stand.

There is motion on the sea road;
hearts flutter
as moving shapes become faces.

The exodus begins.
The young run down the stairs.
The old no longer curse.
Doors open.
Arms open
and close in warm embrace.

Far above,
silent eyes watch
as the road empties.
Tears begin to fall
down the stairs
as on the widow's walk she stands.

I left the rectory at the end of the summer, though I kept coming back to the parish for a while to play with the folk group (not having a car, though, by winter I had stopped doing so). Because of my work and family, and his various assignments out of the area and even out of the country, Father and I were not in regular contact. Still, I did see him occasionally through diocesan events and my work with the diocesan newspaper. Whenever he saw me he'd smile and declare, "It's a Lee."

 

Tom's death came more recently. I met him at college after I left the seminary. We had some mutual friends, and were part of the same circle. We shared a love of music - he taught me some ways to improve my playing, we frequented the college coffee house, and so on. He even tried to teach me how to box. We'd spend hours talking and telling jokes. He was such a caring, decent person.

I wrote a song about this time about a woman who drank too much (the typical good-hearted but flawed woman bluesy type song) and Tom showed up in one of the verses:

Maggie met Dietz one time in a bar
he'd been singing and playing guitar all the night.
Maggie got up, and started to sing,
Dietz didn't mind 'cause together they sounded so right.
She sang the high parts, he sang the low,
She ran out of steam when her whiskey got low,
Dietz didn't mind he just went home and played some mo'.

(What helps to make this song extra special to me was while I wrote most of it, my good friend and playing partner Dave Nittler later helped with a couple of lines, and we used to play it at local coffee houses. Dave, sadly, died a couple of years ago. So this song now reminds me of two old friends.)

I last saw Tom shortly after college. We had to part ways for personal reasons, though there was no fault on his part for those reasons. But I've thought of him often in the years since, and have told stories about him. One was about the time when he was a child and had wandered out of his home and gotten lost. He then spotted a synagogue, and sensing it was a church and had people in it, walked in in the middle of a service and called out, "Take me home!"

The other story, which I used to illustrate courage and decency just this past year, involved a party in his dorm that was beginning to get out of control. At one point, a freshman girl, very drunk, ended up in his suite bathroom, and Tom, realizing that some of the other students were trying to take advantage of her, brought her into his room, locked his door, and kept her there safe. If they had found out, he could have faced some problems, maybe even violence, but Tom was protecting someone, and was willing to take that risk. That's the Tom I knew and liked.

God sends special people our way, and even if they are not in our lives every day, they are still a part of us. Father Metzger and Tom Dietz are and always will be part of me.

Pax et bonum