With my foot on the mend, I’m driving Moise again, and I was reminded today just how much I missed it. I was once again taking him to a bus station.

The tip-off is when a horse and buggy comes trotting past the window on the right but doesn’t come by the one on the left; I know the cart is pulling into our driveway. I left the computer, got up, and walked to the door. Moise was waiting for me. (He never comes in without being invited.)

There he was, “Hey,” he said, “here’s the Boot master.”

For the fourth time, Moise has rejected the pair of winter boots I got for him. There was a strip of color on the bottom, and there wasn’t enough traction for ice or snow.

Moise has a very dry sense of humor, but it’s a sharp one.  He loves to poke me, as do his children.

He knows the boots adventure has been driving me crazy, and this was his way of acknowledging it while joking about it. I see it as a great learning experience for me.

I asked him to come inside, and he did, and we sat at the computer and ordered the boot together, and he saw the morass that shrouds boot buying.

I should have done this a month ago, but as frustrating as it could be, I admire this man for sticking to his beliefs. He doesn’t bend, and he doesn’t break.

Then he asked me if I could drive him to Glens Falls this afternoon; he would take the bus back upstate to attend a wedding. (I was up to my neck in Mansion/Refugee/Bishop Maginn work, but I hadn’t spent time with Moise for a while and I missed  talking to him.)

He was excited about our riding together. We both missed this time; it’s about the only time Moise can stop working and talk. I saw him rubbing his shoulder again; I’ve noticed him wincing and rubbing that shoulder a lot.

Moise always wants me to drive along the back roads so he can look at the farmland, but I usually balk, as the roads are rocky and muddy, and I never quite know where I am. I drive where I want. If he doesn’t like it, I say, his other old neighbor will be happy to move him around. He smiles. He knows I’m not a great follower.

I’m a pain in the ass, just like him.

I asked him what was happening with the shoulder, and he tried to skip the subject, but I pushed it a bit, and he said he thought he had a damaged rotator cuff and was in severe pain much of the time, even when he lay down to sleep.

The pain often wakes him up in the middle of the night. This morning, he got up at 3:30, got dressed, and went outside to dig around the foundations of his new home. He yawned on the ride a few times.

I asked him if he would permit me to get the name of an excellent orthopedic specialist in Saratoga and give it to him; I’m there at the hospital often enough this year. He said nothing. He was silent for a few minutes, and then he said. “yes.” That was all he said, and I wasn’t sure we were talking about the same thing. We were.

He could barely mumble the words; this is not a person who asks for help quickly.

I asked him if the Amish Church would help him pay for surgery if he needed it, he said they would, but he would rather pay for it himself. Pride and humility.

He asked me if I could find out of they had a payment plan for people if he needed one. I said I was sure they did, but I would find out.

I said I needed to know a little more about the pain to find the right place, and he told me about a construction accident he had had years ago and the pain he is in now. I told him I would do some phone work and get back to him.

He asked me more questions about how I make a living. I told him I had had a great day and raised thousands of dollars for the Afghan refugees coming to Albany. Well, he said, you must get some reward for this?

You mean money?, I asked. Yes, he said.

No, I said, I don’t ever make money from raising money for poor people or people at the Mansion or Bishop Maginn. That would be immoral and illegal.

He was surprised at this. Moise is forever trying to figure out how I make a living, and since he doesn’t understand commercial publishing or blogs or the Internet, or Facebook or Paypal, or Venmo, he is just stymied. I am a mystery man to him.

One of the many fascinating things about our friendship is that neither can ever completely understand the other. Moise has nothing in his background to prepare him for somebody like me, a Jew-turned-Quaker turned do-gooder who lived on a farm but never plowed afoot. And nothing in my life prepared me for him, a good man who lives entirely by the values and preaching of Jesus Christ.

But I believe we both love each other, which carries us through and over this fog of confusion and uncertainty. Somehow, we get each other.

When we drove by the Saratoga Race Track, he asked me if I had ever been to a race track (he hasn’t), and I told him how I made a living for a few years when I was very young traveling up and down the East Coast, stopping at all the big race tracks and gambling to make a living.  I didn’t get rich, but I did okay.

This was also something that fascinated him but that he couldn’t quite comprehend. How does one gamble on a horse? How was I paid for my wins, and how did I survive the losses? How did one know how the payoff was decided? He couldn’t put it together. Did I raise the horses, he kept asking.”

No, I said, I know nothing about horses except how fast some can run.

Aside from the fact that the Amish forbid gambling of any kind, he couldn’t understand how it all worked. And I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know myself.

I dropped it. Our conversation about his shoulder led to a discussion of my farm. Moise said he loved Bedlam Farm and often thought he should try to buy it before we met. It was a good size for someone starting in farming or woodwork.

He said his father often came down to work on his farm before he died suddenly a year ago while visiting.

“I’m sorry you two didn’t get to meet,” he said; he would never understand how he could be here for a year and not have met; we lived so close together. I said I wasn’t always very social. Every time we ride together, Moise thinks he can’t believe we hadn’t met before this Spring.

“My father would have liked you,” he said, “you two would have enjoyed  talking to each other.”

I said I was likely to die before Maria, and she might not want to keep the farm for the rest of her life.  Maybe he could get it then; I’d like that, I said, so would she.

“We’d buy it at any time,” he said, “it would be perfect for one of my children.” Then he was silent for a few minutes.

“You know, Johnnie,” he said softly. “I could very well die before you.”

This surprised me. I do know a lot of Amish men die in mid-life or end up with heart disease. We stopped at Stewart’s Convenience Store, and Moise came out with a cup of coffee, a thick slice of Sicilian Pizza slathered in cheese, and some Mountain Dew for the bus ride.

On some level, I think they know what the food they eat can do to them. It’s still God’s will. I know that Amism men all over the country are getting open-heart surgeries.

Moise and I are accepting and open with one another; our friendship has deepened and bloomed into something tangible, there is a lot of trust and affection there. We care about each other.

Even though Moise can’t quite understand me (who can?), he cares about me, and the same is true of me and my feelings for him.

We got to the bus station early. Moise was tired, as he often is. I understand that his shoulder is keeping him awake at night; no wonder he is so thirsty for the caffeine and sugar in Mountain Dews.

The station was closed, but Moise said the bus always came anyway. He knows the bus and train schedules by heart; he studies them all the time from pamphlets and brochures.

We went through the ritual of calling upstate for a ride for someone to come and get him. The woman who answered was named Penny, and she and Moise knew each other well, even though I had to be the person speaking to her.

He had dug into his pock for an enormous, dog-eared, and torn tri-fold wallet that must have had 500 cards with phone numbers on them.

As he looked for Penny’s number to give me, a part of the disintegrating wallet ripped, and his cards flew all over the place. “How long have you had that wallet?” I asked, “oh, many years, he said, “I found it in a trash can; I’ve always liked the tri-folds.”

This was the saddest excuse for a wallet I had ever seen, and I asked him if he needed all those cards, and he said probably not.

He hadn’t thought about a new wallet, he said.

How about we think about it for a bit, I suggested? Would you like a new one? I think I was sent to get you boots with no holes and a wallet that isn’t torn.

I showed him my new thin wallet, and he opened it and turned it over carefully.

“Are these your credit cards?” he asked me, and he took them out and fingered them carefully as if they had dropped out of a spaceship. “We don’t use them,” he said.

I nodded. I know, I said. Would he permit me to look for a new tri-fold wallet for him, or perhaps a different style that held a lot of cards, but not as many as he had.”

Yes, he said. He didn’t want to talk about it, but it was okay to go and look for one. His wallet was an incredible mess. Here we go again, I thought; this will be a roller-coaster ride. He said he would pay me for the wallet, and I said yes, of course.

Moise is a regular agricultural tour giver on a drive. He points out every rye crop or plowed farm or hayed field, or beautiful barn. He says he intends to build a farm and a farmhouse and barn for every one of his 13 living children.

He said they don’t need to be farmers; he just wanted to get them started right in life.

Now I see why he pays so much attention to the land as we drive by; he is always looking for something to buy. At the start of our drive, he told me he was buying a 10-acre plot near his farm.

“It could be a good starting place for one of my children,” he said.

Then the late bus pulled in, and he asked me if he could pay me for the ride – “what do I owe you, Johnnie?” he asked, and I just shook my head, and he didn’t bother to argue this time. “I just can’t take money to give a good friend a ride,” I said.

As I watched him walk to the bus, holding his arm carefully at his side, I thought there was loneliness in the lives of all of us, especially those people who spent so many hours on busses and trains.

One thing, I realized, was something we had in common. I think we both needed a friend.

He nodded, thanked me, and asked if I could pick him up at the bus station at 2 p.m.on Friday.

I said I could.  He was going back home for a wedding, he said. He wanted to get back home early enough to do some work on the new house.

Tomorrow, I start looking for big fat wallets that hold a lot of cards and I will call my primary and get the name of a good orthopedist. That one will be a tussle.