Later in life, I believe I am finally able and open to making real friends. Friends I love and trust and value. Friends who are empathetic and value loyalty. Friends that are nourishing and affirming.
I know the barest outlines of Ron Dotson’s life, but he is very important to me. I see him once a year, and sometimes not even that. He is not much into e-mailing or texting. I know he is a Vietnam Vet, a marine grievously injured in that war. I know that after the war he devoted his life to caring for people and helping them, he is an elder, part of a church ministry in Ohio, he helps a lot of people.
Last year, he came up to Cambridge to camp out near Bedlam Farm with his son, I haven’t seen or heard from his since until he showed up Saturday at the Open House. He is shy and eager to not be intrusive. He never is or could be.
Ron has a gentleness and compassion about him, he is easy to trust and to talk to, a good listener.
Although we rarely speak or see one another, I feel especially close to him, as if he were a brother. And yet we are very different in many ways, or so I assume. Friendship is curious that way, sometimes you never really know what connects one person to another. Faith is like that also, I am drawn to faith, and Ron is imbued with faith.
Ron is a highly intelligent and intuitive, I get the sense he grasps me well, the good and the bad, and accepts me fully. Perhaps that is part of his ministry. This week, we will do what we always do and have lunch at the Round House. Then he will disappear for another year, off to do good.
He never complains or speaks in anger and judgment. He seems to be all about good. I know that Ron is an elder in the Hope Church outside of Cincinnati:
“We are a gathering of sinners rescued by God’s PURSUING LOVE,” says the church website, ” growing to love God, one another, and anyone God sends across our path! We are a work in progress. So join us, grow with us, and help us become all that God intends!”
It’s odd, for a man born Jewish turned Quaker, now somewhat lapsed in both faiths, to connect with a sinner, although I am surely one, but Ron lives his Christian faith, he doesn’t just talk it as so many hypocrites do. He is always there for people, he knows what it means to suffer, something so many of our political leaders have forgotten how to do.
If I were ever in trouble, he is one of the very first person I would reach out to. And he would come. I am sorry to say I have had many friends for whom that is not the case. Ron has seen a lot of things human beings should not have to see.