An Unexpected Friendship

One hot day in the middle of June, I happened to notice this little empty house next to the hayfield. I was on a tractor raking some hay for baling. It was a two story farmhouse, tilted and tired looking, with a crooked enclosed front porch with plywood over the windows.  As soon as I saw it, my heart started to pound.  The lawn was overgrown, the fence row along the driveway was wild and bushy.  Jon would love it.

I drove the tractor straight through the field to the back yard of the owner, Paul Lowe.  I was 25 years old, tanned and sweaty in T shirt and shorts, but I didn’t stop to consider what I looked like. He was sitting on his back patio, watching me from under his straw hat, squinting into the sun.

He was a Humpty Dumpty – in his mid-50’s, a few inches over 5 feet tall, with a big tight round belly.  I knew that he worked for the water authority, drove a Chevy pick-up truck that was much too tall for him and in the afternoons he sat out on his back patio and drank beer and looked at his fields. 

He looked up at me from under his big bushy eyebrows, and he grinned, waiting. He knew who I was, but we had barely ever spoken to each other, maybe never.

"Hey, how you doing?"
"All right, how are you?"

“So, what’s that house over there?”

“It’s my house.”

“Does anybody live there?”

“No.  Plenty of people want to live there.  They ask me all the time.”

“I think I might want to live there.”

“Yeah?”

“Why does it look so crooked?”

“When they moved it, they got in too much of a hurry, and they dropped it.”

“Does it have any heat?”

“Wood stove.”

“I think I do want to live there.”

“I think that’ll work.”

Jon and I lived in the house for four happy years. Becoming friends with Paul Lowe was an unexpected bonus.  He was the son of a dairy farmer and a veteran of the Navy. He was a lifelong conservative and a Reagan supporter. Our political beliefs could not have been further apart, but we had both grown up on farms, we respected each other's capacity for work, and we enjoyed a good conversation.

Sitting in front of the TV after delivering the monthly rent in cash ($150), I learned lots about him. Years ago his wife had suddenly left him with three young children to raise alone and yet he did not speak of her with bitterness or anger.  His children were still on good terms with both their mother and their father. They visited Paul regularly.  He had worked hard all his life, as a dairy man, a butcher, and then for the county, never leaving the property except for his time in the Navy.  Paul Lowe had inherited thirty acres from his father and he was the master of his universe.  He looked forward to selling some day and retiring.

He knew he was sitting on a gold mine and he loved the feeling.   Finally an offer came in that he couldn’t refuse – $30,000 a month for the right to buy the property within a certain time. The developer’s ambition was to rezone it for “mixed use.”  If the rezoning failed and the developer gave up, Paul got to keep the money.  If the developer wanted to buy the farm, Paul would sell. 

The court denied the rezoning but the developer decided to buy the farm anyway and build houses instead. The developer expected that they would sell for a million dollars each.  Less than a mile from Tysons Corner, the location would sell itself.  Paul Lowe probably got about two million dollars and he was happy.

He bought a five acre mini-estate on the other end of the county, far away from the traffic and intensity of Tysons Corner and he hired a custom builder. The five acres came with a barn and a pond.  It was the barn that decided him.  He filled it with the tractors and equipment that he couldn’t leave behind.  It tickled him to have a little barn.

He built a mansion with a six-truck garage – complete with a full shower -- for his son-in-law’s collection of vehicles, and he put in a gigantic kitchen for his daughter.  For himself he designed in a small room for his recliner and his TV, right next to the kitchen. The house had a grand entryway with a cathedral ceiling and extra rooms upstairs and down, but Paul felt at home in his little cave. The rest of the house was his daughter's to manage.

One day while we sat in his dark little TV room, he took a long time telling a story about mowing his lawn because he kept stopping – his eyes crinkled shut and his belly jiggled as he wheezed and laughed, remembering getting the mower stuck at the edge of the pond.  He had been trying to push it out when a local workman stopped to help him.  They eventually managed to get unstuck, and the Good Samaritan said “You’d better hurry up and finish mowing this lawn before your boss gets home!”  Paul got a huge kick out of that story.

A friend of Paul’s suggested he invest the rest of his money in his building supplies business, and he did, but the business went bankrupt and the money was lost.

And here is where things began to unravel.  It just crushed Paul to have lost his children’s inheritance.  His kids continued to work and they did not fault him for the loss, but he got depressed.  He sat in his recliner in his dark cave, didn’t go anywhere, watched TV, and felt bad.  Then Paul got kidney disease and had to go on dialysis three times a week. 

When his grandson was away at summer camp for a week, Paul took his shotgun in the middle of the day and went behind the garage and killed himself.  He didn’t want to leave a mess indoors for his daughter and he didn’t want to frighten his grandson. 

He died of not knowing what to do with disappointment and despair.  He did not have a toolkit for that. He had some good luck and some bad luck, and he didn’t like being an ailing, uncomfortable, unhappy old man.  His candle burned brightly and then sputtered and he blew it out.

Dialysis was probably what really pushed him to take his life, and he isn't alone or even irrational in that decision. But it was hard on his daughter and his grandson, that choice he made.  Again, no one blamed him and no one was angry with him for very long. There are other ways his story could have ended (if he hadn't had a gun, if he hadn't been so lonely, if he hadn't felt so bad about the money). I sat in the little chapel, looking at his little body in the casket, more dressed up than I had ever seen him in life, and I told him I would not forget him. I will always remember that laugh that took over his entire body from his eyes down through his round belly, as he leaned forward in his chair and grabbed his knees, wheezing with joy.

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