Feeling loss as the New Year begins

The calendar is what it is, and the days of the week fall on it accordingly. My columns appear on Friday. This year, I was dealt Dec. 26 and Jan. 2. Columns on such days seem somewhat anticlimactic. On the first, Christmas Day is over. By the time we get to the second, we have passed New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, so the festivities and the football, if one is inclined to either, are past us. Because everything seems to slow up somewhat for the holidays, not much has happened recently to write about. So, what can a Jan. 2 column be about? New Year's resolutions? Sure, but these turn out to be boring, and most of them will soon be forgotten. Predicting the coming year? Your guess is as good as mine. I think what the columnist must do is to write about what's on his mind at the moment. What is on mine right now is loss. I learned last week when I read Jeff Fleming's blog about the passing of Bill Dudney. Just a few days later, I learned about the death of Don Mason. I opened Facebook and noticed the announcement of the birthdays of friends who are no longer with us and an obituary for a high school classmate. That's a bit jarring. Then I got notifications from the app "Telegram" that two people who are dead had joined. What? How could that happen? I suppose that anyone in my age bracket is condemned to feel loss from time to time. But it still takes one aback when it happens. So, today, I want to write a little bit about Bill and Don, celebrating their lives through the sadness of loss. Most of my friends know that Deb has been quite ill for a while now. She spent over a week in the hospital and in rehabilitation in mid-December, and I was preoccupied with her condition while trying to keep everything else in the road, so I did not learn about Bill Dudney's passing until a week after it happened. I was stunned. I knew Bill had some health issues, but I had no idea they were so severe. I can't say Bill and I were close friends. We didn't socialize. We were rather cordial work colleagues and later fellow volunteers at the Kingsport Area Chamber of Commerce. When I first met Bill, he was a young loan officer at First Tennessee National Bank, a position at which he excelled, rising to local president before leaving for Citizens Bank, where he also became president. I did legal work from time to time for the banks, so our paths crossed every now and then. There have been many tributes to Bill Dudney over the past two weeks, all deserved. I don't have anything much to add to them. But I will observe this from my time at the Chamber, where Bill not only served as president, but later for several years as the vice president for economic development: Bill was both an optimist and a realist. He firmly believed in the present and future of his hometown of Kingsport, but he didn't buy in to pie-in-the-sky illusions of attracting more industrial giants to our city. Bill focused on more realistic goals, and in his work at the Chamber and on the Kingsport Economic Development Board did a great deal of good for the area. He did so while rearing a family and keeping his head firmly on his shoulders. I admired and respected him a great deal. Don, or Donnie, as many of us called him, was more of a free spirit. A very fine lawyer, he was capable of saying outrageous and frequently amusing things. These would come out of the blue and leave everyone sitting around him at a loss for words. That included his wife, Cindy, who would just roll her eyes. Don and I were not consistent social friends, but we visited each other's homes, went boating, and sometimes to ball games. He practiced labor and employment law, an area of practice that I shared. He also gave back to his community, serving on the board of directors for Legal Services of East Tennessee for a decade. I had no idea he had been ill and was stunned by the news of his passing. These two men were part of the life of the community. They were part of my life. They will be missed by many. Including me. Bob Arrington is a Kingsport attorney. You can email him at r_arrington@chartertn.net.