Let’s just say for the sake of argument and column writing that there really is an unfathomable great beyond. And let’s say it’s a place of inexplicable sentience where the essence of beings we knew and loved exist in perpetuity and await our arrival.
Some of us believe that. Others hope for it. Some do both.
I’m one of the hopeful believers, most days. Like, say, yesterday.
Leaning on the metal railing above a racquetball court at the Rapid City YMCA, I had no doubt that Ron Bender was somehow present and somehow smiling in whatever way an enduring spirit might smile at the sight down below: Mary and Jackson whacking the ball around on one of Bender’s courts.
One of his racquetball courts.
Well, not only Bender’s. The YMCA’s, too, of course. And the whole community’s, really, because a healthy YMCA is a sign of a healthy community.
But Bender had prominence in the pack of racquetball rats who helped build that court and its next-door neighbor so many years ago. He was one of the early organizers promoting the YMCA racquetball program, which is now something like, oh, half a century old, and thriving.
It’s a place Bender loved. A place where he excelled. And a place where he is now remembered each year in a tournament in his honor.
The Annual Ron Bender Memorial Racquetball Tournament will return to Bender’s courts this weekend, to be played at a much higher level of skill than Mary and Jackson were presenting last night.
But probably not at any higher level of joy.
I shared their elevated mood — seasonal affective disorder notwithstanding — as I watched them dance, not always gracefully, to the music of heavy breathing and squeaking sneakers and the echoing “thud” of the racquetball smacking the white walls and hardwood floor.
And I sensed a presence nearby. A real presence.
Of course, it might simply have been a recollection magnified by the sights and sounds and smells of the place Ron Bender knew and loved. Or it might have been something even more. I’m inclined toward the more.
Either way, I have no doubt that Bender would have loved the rough-edged racquet work in action below. And not just because he loved racquetball. He would have loved it, in part, because of who was involved.
Bender was fond of Mary, as I think he was fond of me. Like me, Mary once worked as a reporter in the Rapid City Journal newsroom when Bender held one editorial position or another. Like me, she liked him and knew him to be an able, committed journalist who also managed to be kind.
Unusually kind, in fact, by the standards of newsroom managers, who aren’t typically inclined or often instructed by their managers to put kindness first while producing a news product and enforcing newsroom directives. So, yes, he was a bit of a softy, the kind of softy who might weep as he edited a poignant personal column or story.
As Bender aged, he cried more often at his work, sitting at his desk in the center of the Journal newsroom, nibbling an assortment of nuts, sipping diet cola and gently offering smart-aleck comments to one passing person or another. As he edited a story, he peered at the computer screen through a pair of massive, plastic-framed reading glasses that, on anyone else, would have seemed kind of clown-like.
But for some reason, they worked for Bender, making him even more endearing.
And easier or not, I still enjoyed it when I could inspire tears from Bender by something I wrote. I loved it when he would set down his glasses, rise from his chair and with a head shake walk over to my desk with tears in his eyes to say: “You SOB, you did it again!”
We all did it, again. And again. And we all loved it. We loved him, too.
A smart child of small-town South Dakota who embraced his education year by year, culminating at Augustana University (then College) in Sioux Falls, Bender brought a mix of skills to his various jobs at the Journal in a career there that spanned almost 40 years. At 64, he left earlier for retirement than he’d planned, after deciding that he couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust to new demands — some of them quite ridiculous — by a new editor in a new-and-diminished newspaper business.
He’d known the best of times in newspapering. He wasn’t prepared or inclined to be part of the worst of times. So he left us in sadness, heading off into a retirement of reading and racquetball and more time with family. But an all-too-short retirement it was.
Bender was on a family visit in November of 2007, just a few months after he retired, when he died. He was visiting his brother in Maryland, walking to a store to buy olives when he was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver.
So a newsman died far from home in a tragic, news-making way that added shock to the grief suffered by his family and friends.
Twelve years beyond the hard news of Bender’s death, I stood in the place that mattered so much to him, a place where his presence can still be felt, I believe, as I watched two people I love so much play the game he loved so well.
Bender never knew Jackson. He died eight months before Jackson was born. But I have no doubt Bender would have been a fan, would have teased him in a gentle Bender way when Jackson showed up in the newsroom, would have worried over him, too, and encouraged him to pick up the racquet and swing it for fun.
Which is just what Jackson and his Grandma Mary were doing last night, to their delight and mine.
“It’s official,” I called down to them from my perch above the court. “You guys are my favorite racquetball players.”
I had a favorite before them, though — a fine journalist, a good man and an excellent racquetball player. He has now become part of what the poet Stanley Kunitz calls the “feast of losses,” that the heart must reconcile as we age and those we care about pass on.
I felt a sense of that loss and of that feast standing there above Bender’s court. And I believe — in the way some of us are open to believing — that something, or someone, more than simple recollection had gathered around me.
