A Table for Two, A Bed of Kelp
On my third day at the writers' conference, I parked myself at a rear table in the hotel restaurant, planning to tap at my computer or peruse the schedule or maybe just sit there and think while enjoying a salad in solitude, but an elderly woman at an adjacent table turned to me and asked if I would join her for lunch. I was in a head-down, private kind of mood and had been looking forward to getting myself sorted out, and my first inner reaction was a most uncharitable Oh, please, just leave me alone or something along those lines.
I somehow assumed she would be tedious, that making friendly chit-chat would be an energy drain. But look at her, I thought. Do I really have the heart to reject her invitation after she’s been so forthcoming about her desire for company? Is anything I am doing that important? In a nutshell, I felt sorry for her. It was a pity date, but I said yes and relocated to her table.
And it turns out she was the most interesting, irreverent, and spirited person I’d run into since the start of the conference. She told me about growing up during the Depression, living on her father's rum-runner boat, fishing for food. She told me about her days as a mountain climber, about her three concurrent husbands, and about the time she'd finally gotten the glint of attention from an agent on a manuscript she'd written by claiming she had committed a murder. Maybe she told me couple of fibs too; I didn’t really care.
The important thing was that at 87 years of age, she was there, navigating her way around a writers’ conference, putting herself on the line, and making a point of meeting new people.
New people like me -- who thought I was indulging her and turned out to be the dud.
A reminder to be open.
Later in the week, my friend Tony called. Like the lady at the writers' conference, he, too, is in his eighties, and I have written about him in this blog before. Tony spent his boyhood on this Ranch, and it shaped his character. Endless days of unsupervised exploration made him self-sufficient and resilient, and he still has a little wildness in his heart.
“I left the Ranch,” is how he puts it, “but after all these years, the Ranch has never left me.”
These are challenging times for Tony, though. His vision has deteriorated lately and his mobility is diminished, and I know there are days when he's in pain. Still, I harbor the hope that he will manage to make the trip out here sometime. I think it will be good for him to smell the sea and the chaparral, and to show his grandson the tree he planted long ago.
In the meantime, he has a way of summoning up the Ranch in his mind, and I believe it is a comfort to him. On this day he told me how he used to go swimming in the ocean and fall asleep on the kelp beds far from the shore. He was that relaxed, that much in his element.
I thanked him for the gift of that image, and I treasure it --a little black-haired boy asleep on the sea in a cradle of seaweed.
A reminder to listen.