A stitched-together community
One day Bill didn't show up at the church, so we went to find him.
“How are you related to this man?” the EMT asked me as he put Bill in the back of the ambulance. I climbed in after them. There was no good answer. Friend? Not really. Colleague? Coworker? He was more than an acquaintance. “He . . . we work together,” I finally said.
Bill was the front-walk shoveler, meat-loaf maker, coffee brewer, Saturday night grumpster-in-chief at my church. Every time I arrived at the church, he was busy doing something. He filled the steam-table pans for our community meal. He made sure the stairs were clear of snow. He helped install the handicap ramp. He cleaned the bathroom.
He’d arrived in Leadville decades before I had, when he was 19. He had served in Vietnam and planned to use wages earned in the mining industry to fund his addiction to any and every substance. In his forties, he’d settled on alcohol.
