Mystery Man

The bee was waiting, apparently, as we walked up the ninth fairway of the old Maryvale Municipal Golf Course, that hot summer day of long ago. I was half-a-year past 17, Jerry had just celebrated his 14^th birthday, and both of us were flexing our youth and energy and the lessons we’d accumulated in junior swing school the year before.

We were happy with the small miracle of having both put our drives down the middle of the long fairway. Waxing philosophical on who-knows-what, we strode up to his ball, and he was lining up his next shot when I spied the aforementioned bee, big as a hummingbird and crawling around on the top of Jerry’s hat.

“Stand still,” I said.

“What?”

“You’ve got a bee on you.” I was easing my own cap off my head.

He flinched, half-crouching. “Can you get him?”

“I think so – hold still.”

A second’s suspense as I gently hoisted my cap up high … then, with all the fury I might have reserved for a gaping rattlesnake, I whipped it down – WHACK! – on Jerry’s skull.

“OW!” he yelled, staggering from the impact. He shook the world spinning before his eyes back into place. “Man! You nearly killed me. Did you get it?”

“No,” I admitted. A combination of shock, pain, and incredulity burst from his face. I started laughing. Then he started laughing, rubbing his smarting head, and we stood there, giggling under the wide blue sky.

We always enjoyed telling each other that story, through the years: the day I stunned him, nearly breaking his head, swinging at an elusive bee.

A few weeks ago, it was finally his turn, I guess, to stun me. Word came that he’d killed himself, in the parking lot of a golf course.

There are so many things in life that we don’t know – can’t know. I suppose that’s why, sometimes, we lay too much stock by the things we think we do.

Jerry and I were friends for most of 50 years. We never had to work for something to say.

Conversation leaped into overdrive every time we came together, and our lunch reunions always sped by, filled with questions, anecdotes (new and old), memories (fond and otherwise), comments on the passing scene. Year after year, we played “whatever happened to …”, Name That Tune, and “don’t you wonder …” over burgers and fries and iced tea.

We compared work challenges. We asked about each other's parents. I nudged him for stories of his children, pictures of his grandkids.

I can't remember seeing anything in his eyes that looked like real pain. Or a deepening frustration. Or a growing despair. He had frowns to go with his wonderful grin, and his big eyes sometimes darkened with perspective on some subject he or I was grappling with. But never anything really serious: no startling revelations, no bitter complaints, no glimpses of gnawing agonies or drifting hope.

As kids, he loved to get me going on the plot of some TV show or movie I‘d seen, listening wide-eyed as I related the action, the dialogue, the suspense. Once, sitting on a bus on the way up to youth camp, he urged me along on some cinematic rerun until, to my surprise, I suddenly realized a little group of our peers was listening. Jerry looked at them, beaming ear to ear.

“Isn’t this great?” he asked the impromptu audience. “He never leaves anything out.”

Ah, Jerry … wish I could say that. But, somehow, across so many years – all that happy give-and-take – we managed to bury the lead.

Jerry gave his life to Christ as a boy. He may not have held very fast to that commitment, as the years went by, but I choose to believe Christ held on for him.

We believe in a merciful God, and His mercies shine like stars, today, in the darkness Jerry left behind.

I believe my friend is in a place now where the pains he hid for so long are hidden no more, because they are no more. That his joy, at last, may be full.

That he has found, now and forever, the peace that eluded him, like an agile bee, when life hit him harder than he was ready for.