Another week without a phone call…
I’ve been putting off writing this, probably because it would feel more real. More final. But I guess this is the forum for it and there’s no point procrastinating any longer.
Hal was always around growing up. When we needed another player for our fantasy baseball league he would graciously join. Anytime a basketball, football, softball or volleyball game would break out around the meadow at Plow Creek, he was involved. Always pushing, but always supportive. At least that’s how I remember it.
For some reason the Oberheide’s had a large knife with the tip broken off in their kitchen at the church house. One day I got the brilliant idea to pour ketchup on Josh’s leg and set the knife up so that it appeared as though he had been impaled with it while he screamed in fake agony. Hal came running into the kitchen and flinched. The look on his face told me that the prank had succeeded, if only too well. Sorry, Josh, if you took the brunt of that scolding.
When I was 16 my family moved 90 minutes away to Bloomington, but we still enjoyed visiting when we could. Years later, when Kelly and I were dating, we enjoyed hanging around Hal’s campsite at Cornerstone while he played guitar and gave us relationship advice. About 3 years before we got married, Kelly and I hit a really low point and I needed to get out of town and clear my head. I found myself on Hal’s doorstep unannounced, needing a place to crash. “Oh Ben, you’re not a crash,” he said.
We kept in touch after Kelly and I finally got married and moved halfway across the country to Las Vegas. We found a way to meet up in Arizona to see the Cubs lose to the Angels in a Spring training game. We flew back to Illinois pretty regularly to visit family, and would usually find a way to meet up with Hal for lunch.
By the late 2000’s I had acquired a cell phone. Hal called me up out of the blue to talk about an exciting young Bulls team. It had been a lean decade since Michael Jordan retired for the 2nd time, but they had an influx of talent, led by a first overall pick from Chicago named Derrick Rose.
From then on, for the past 14 years, I estimate we talked once a week for about 3 hours at a time. Fortunately we don’t have to worry about long distance charges in this day and age. “What do you talk about for that long?” my wife would often grill me. We usually started out playing armchair GM, evaluating the Bulls or Cubs, making imaginary roster moves to return them to glory. One heavenly evening in November of 2016 it actually worked! Then we’d move on to music, movies or TV shows that we both watched, like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. But sooner or later we just talked about life. We discussed parenting, spiritual issues, or just what we were having for dinner. Memories of Tiskilwa or Reba Place Fellowship.
He was the first one I called when my dad died 9 years ago. I guess I sort of adopted him as a father figure after that. Or he adopted me.
Then one day he tells me he has about a year to live. My heart skipped a beat as I struggled to process what my ears had heard. He was always coughing and wheezing on the phone, but we just paused and moved on. The conversations got a little more serious after that. More politics and world events, more religion and mortality, less sports and entertainment. But always family.
About a week before he died, he called me up at 6 in the morning, panicked and disoriented. He didn’t know what day it was. We talked for a while until he calmed down. The last thing I told him was that I loved him, an opportunity I didn’t get with my own father, who died quite suddenly.
A few weeks ago the sermon at church was on Proverbs 27:5-6. Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses. Our pastor talked about how people deal with conflict and how Jesus seemed to go out of his way to address what he called a false peace. This reminded me of Hal quite a bit. It’s a quality that I’m sure rubbed some people the wrong way. It’s a rare quality, and one that I will miss.
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