We could take care of that for you

Perhaps the most God-fearing person I know is a tough old Jewish lady whose many hedges I trim and prune on her acreage. A great wall going around the front yard and into the back, around fifteen feet high that takes days just for one side, cylinders down the snaking driveway, separate huge boxes, outer parameters with lengths of solid wall, backyard boxwood, all the individual specimens, etc. She likes things squeaky clean and I'm OCD OCO(rder) so things work out great between us.

She's the kind of lady you can picture coming out of her house in a bathrobe and carrying a shotgun for any intruders. She speaks her mind no matter who you are, and it's upfront and somewhat loud, somewhat boisterous, and, I don't know how to say it, she gets it out there, especially if there is something she sees that is wrong. She's the kind that bureaucrats cannot stand.

Though I've always liked her, I remember the time when I grew especially fond. A number of years ago, somewhere around late September, I was working away on the boxwood (the majority are cedar) and it was getting toward evening when she came hurrying out and spoke with emphatic energy.

"You gotta go! You gotta get all the equipment up and get out of here!" And then she said it was - I can't remember what Jewish day it was - it was a big one. At the time it was quite hot and I welcomed the sudden command to quit for the day and go home. If I'm working on a Friday I make sure to pack up before sunset.

But the way she expressed it - this urgency that had to do with something greater than any of us, or any thing. Why did I feel such joy under that fiery and fierce injunction to pack up?

We never talk religion though.

Another time my fondness for her grew - let's call her D. - was when she told me about some of her family coming up to visit her from the US, I think her niece. She had her boyfriend along (cohabiting), and they were assuming they were to share a room at night, when D. said to them, point blank, "Not under my roof you won't!"

I wish I could describe the way D. said it - "Not under my roof you won't!" I laugh about that when I remember it.

Just last week we got to talking about the Hell's Angels and the CIA (D. was explaining to me how the Hell's Angels originated after the Second World War), and in the conversation she told me how she worked as an accountant for a mill at the age of eighteen doing payrolls for an exceedingly large number of workers in a very short period of time.

There was a man who worked there, and D. went on about how nice of a man he was: he was the nicest man she had ever met.

One day she started complaining to this incredibly nice man about her boss, and the nice man said to her, "Would you like him taken care of?" To which D. - quite shocked - said, "What?"

And he said, "I can get him taken out for you" as he went on to explain in his nice manner about how he belonged to a group that existed precisely for doing such things - that is, killing people. He wasn't kidding.

D. of course emphatically told him NO, and as shocked as she was by this, what shocked her even more was the way this man broached the subject. He talked about it like someone might talk pleasantly about the wine tour they were looking forward to on the weekend, or about the local coffee shop whose lemon squares come highly recommended.

Long story short, I started thinking about that story today; and that there are many, many very nice doctors.

Some of the nicest doctors you could ever meet.