Joan Leegant

Allen and I met Dick by recruiting him to marry us.  We needed a freelancer
who was willing to perform a wedding in our backyard on Day Street in
Auburndale.  Dick blew shofar at the then-Chapel Minyan at Emanuel where
Allen went for the holidays, so in the spring of 1982, when we decided to
get married, he thought of Dick.

We made an appointment and met Dick at his office near B.U. He asked a few
questions about who we were, how we'd met, then asked where we were going to
shul these days.  We both looked at the floor and shuffled our feet, and
Dick said, There's this minyan you might like.  Then he promptly invited us
to dinner. I don't remember if he called Sherry to check, but we got the
feeling that Dick showing up at home with stray guests happened with some
frequency.

Over the years we had some opportunity - though not enough - to reciprocate
in terms of meals.  Dick was a brave eater.  One Fall I was trying
desperately to make challah.  The finished product was more like a
paperweight than bread.  After getting dismal results at Rosh Hashanah, I
ventured to serve my challot to Dick and Sherry on Sukkot, the first and
only guests I dared to serve it to.  It looked nice enough on the plate but
required a chain saw to cut.  Dick ate his piece gamely, reached for more,
told me it was delicious. This was enough to keep me at it until, one day,
by sheer accident (I had to leave the house unexpectedly for a few hours
while the dough was rising), I actually succeeded in producing an edible
loaf. I served it to Dick and Sherry the next time they came over, and Dick
said he didn't recall the other challah being that bad, had there been a
problem?

That's how it was with Dick: in his understated way, he was a real
cheerleader.  When I first began preparing drashot, I'd call Dick each time,
mid-week, in a panic.  I can't do it, will you take it over, it's not coming
together.  "Oh, that's just the Wednesday Syndrome," Dick would say, casual.
"You'll see; by Thursday night it'll be fine." Then he'd hang up and it
would become Thursday and the thing would come together.  When I first began
sending my fiction out for publication, collecting the usual flood of
rejections, Dick one day, apropos of nothing, gave me a book of rejection
letters sent to famous writers. During our one-year sojourn in Oregon Dick
was our most faithful email correspondent.  We emailed two, three times a
week, little things, just to keep in touch.  He knew instinctively how to be
supportive; how to be caring and concerned without making a big display of
it.

He had extraordinary patience. No question was too silly, too tedious.  At
his funeral, my son Eli, who helped out Dick with his bees during the last
couple of years, said to me, The thing about Dick is, you could ask him the
same question forty times, and he'd still always give you an answer.