(This is yet another essay that did not make my memoir: LEAVING THE LAND of NUMB: A JOURNEY TO CONNECT MY EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL LIVES. The memoir will be available on Amazon in July. WATCH FOR DETAILS!)
In September 1975 I met a guy in college named Larry who latched onto me. We both needed a friend, someone who would accept us as we were—warts and all. I had just gone through a teenage divorce, and Larry had given up drugs for Jesus and driving through red lights going 80 mph. We both were trying to figure out what we would do with our lives, asking God where he was leading us and very uncertain about what was next. I thought I might like to be a pastor but already had discovered that some churches I encountered were not very open to those who had been divorced. My mistakes made no difference to Larry, and his made no difference to me.
When it came to sharing what he felt and saying exactly what he thought, Larry was an open book—too open actually. Sometimes he was not, shall we say, very self-aware. But he was honest. He really didn’t care what people thought about him as he openly shared his painful and positive emotions, whatever they may have been on any particular day. I liked that. I, on the other hand, cared a lot about what people thought about me. I did not want to be judged, so I played my cards close to the vest.
Larry was a city boy from Phoenix; I was a small town kid from Colby, Kansas.
Larry was opinionated (very opinionated), crass, funny and odd. But he also was open-hearted and gave me a wide berth. Never once did he force me to talk about what I didn’t want to talk about. When he talked openly about his emotions, I was drawn to that. I did a lot of listening. I had grown up in a home where sharing emotions was not our strong suit. Larry was pretty much an open book. He felt and shared all sorts of emotions. I was from the Land of Numb and I remember thinking, “How is he able to be so open like that?”
When the 1976 Spring break rolled around, Larry asked me to go with him from Manhattan, Kansas, to Phoenix, Arizona, where I could meet his family and we could spend the week in the sun, goofing around Phoenix. “We’ll stay at my home,” he said. “You’ll have your own bedroom and bathroom, with a sliding door out to your own patio, where you can sit, and have morning devotions.”
I thought Larry was kidding about the private room and sliding door out to the patio and said, “Very funny, Larry.” He shrugged and said, “It’s true.” Off we headed, driving through the night. Soon enough I would see for myself. As the sun was rising, we pulled into Phoenix and suddenly were at the entrance of the Arizona Biltmore Estates in north Phoenix, where there was, as they say, “a lot of old money.” Larry hadn’t told me that his dad was the founder and CEO of a successful insurance company or that his mother was a central player in Arizona politics. In fact his mother was the first woman to head the Republican Party in Arizona, a position she held for many years.
Larry’s home looked out on to the Arizona Biltmore golf course. When we arrived at the gated community, Larry pulled out a pass from the glove compartment and showed it to the guard at the gatehouse. The guard raised the gate, and Larry snaked his car through the exclusive neighborhood, before finally pulling up onto a half-moon drive and stopping in front of his stunning home.
“This is it?” I asked.
“Yep,” Larry said. “This is it.”
“Wow, Larry.”
In the middle of the house there was a water fall flowing through desert plants. The walls were full of paintings of western scenes painted by well-known artists from the Southwest. And indeed, just as Larry had said, I had my own room with its own private bath. A sliding glass door in the bedroom exited onto its own patio, where, just as Larry said, I pulled open the door in the morning and stepped onto a private patio, where I sat in a comfortable patio chair reading my Bible. A friendly full-time native-American maid took me under her wing, befriending me and insisting that I let her do my laundry. This kid from a working-class family was in tall cotton that week.
Almost every day, Larry and I ate at the Arizona Biltmore clubhouse restaurant, where Larry signed his name to his dad’s account. One evening toward the end of the week, Larry’s dad sat Larry and me down in the living room where he tried to recruit me to be an insurance agent for his company. Holding a lighted cigar, he spoke directly to me. “I think you should finish your Bible degree up there in Kansas and then come out here. It’s safe to say that before you know it, you will do very well financially—probably beyond your wildest imagination. I think you’ll love Phoenix. I do. There are a lot of great churches here in the valley. You’ll find one where you fit right in.”
He was charming, self-assured, insistent and more opinionated that his son Larry. I’m not sure Larry’s dad was right in everything he said, but he was absolutely certain in how he said it! At one point, he asked me what I thought of Jimmy Carter, who was running on the democratic ticket for the November presidential election. He was testing me, but I said, “I like Carter. He seems like a good man.”
“What?” he said, puffing on his cigar and laughing. “Now don’t tell me you’d ever vote for a democrat,” he said, reiterating to me that Larry’s mom was the current chairperson of the Arizona Republican party. She was not in the room. “You’re in Barry Goldwater country, man.” Somehow it didn’t register with me that I was in such powerful political company.
Of course, the bus only goes in one direction. Ultimately, my bus went east, when I moved from Kansas to Illinois, not southwest to Arizona. I became a campus pastor at the University of Illinois, not an insurance man in Phoenix. Happily, I stayed connected to the valley of the sun by marrying Jennifer in Phoenix in 1978. On July 8, we celebrate 45 years. She grew up in the eastern part of the metro-Phoenix, out in the city of Mesa just a mile from the Mormon Temple.
We returned to Phoenix many times over the years before moving back in July 2021.
The summer of 2017, we spent 10 weeks in Phoenix. My ministry board gave me a sabbatical to study Spiritual Formation at Phoenix Seminary. I sat around the pool pondering life and reading. The condo we rented was next to the Paradise Memorial Gardens in Scottsdale, a place where I liked to take walks. Sauntering through the cemetery one day, I was very surprised to see the graves of my friend Larry’s parents and one of his brothers. Their grave sites were just 100 yards from the condo we rented. After I moved back to Phoenix in the summer of 2021, I returned to the graves and paid my respects.
Sadly, my old friend Larry died nearly 30 years ago out in California, where he was living and raising a son. Larry didn’t make it to age 40. One summer day in the early 1990s, Larry called me out of the blue when I was living in Urbana. He said he got my number from the alumni office at the Christian college where we met. Larry lived in Orange county California. We had not talk for 15 years. He was married with a 10-year-old son. He announced that he and his boy were going to take a cross-country road trip. “Just the two of us,” he said. He wanted to stop in Illinois and see me. That conversation ended with Larry saying, “I’ll call you back with the details in a couple of days.” He never did.
A couple months later a person from the college in Kansas called me. He knew both Larry and me and told me that Larry had died. “I don’t know the details, but I thought you’d like to know.” After hanging up, I immediately called the insurance company in Phoenix that his dad started and served as its CEO. We spoke briefly. When I asked what happened to Larry, he replied, “I don’t know.”
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.”
I knew the town in California where Larry lived, and tried to find more information. I wasn’t successful. I even called the court house and inquired about a death certificate, but never got one. After I moved to Phoenix in August 2021, and was visiting the graves of Larry’s dad and mom, and his brother, I thought back to the days in the mid-1970s when the two of us became fast friends and how Larry accepted me as I was, not as how he thought I should be. His friendship was just what I needed.
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