It’s What We Do

I read somewhere that the depth of a marine layer is typically around 1500 feet, but surely there was a mile of cool moist air sitting on top of the ocean in the August days of 1999. It was a marine layer that wouldn’t leave. Each white day blurred into the next, and John kept telling me he was waiting for the light.

 John was a well-known photographer and recently widowed neighbor. His wife Linda had been my friend, and shortly before her death I promised her I’d look in on him. That was in January, and now it was August, and John was still in the throes of his terrible grief. I had a notion that just getting outside and moving around could make anybody feel a little better, so I made it my mission to go to his house and drag him out for a little while each day.

We would drive along the main road, listening to music. There was a CD called Bleeker Street that he seemed to like, a collection of folksy songs from the 1960s, as good a soundtrack as any. We often parked by the mailboxes at Alegria Canyon to hike a brisk loop past the pond, up a steep climb, and back around. Sometimes we linked arms as we walked, learning each rise and curve by heart, and I listened, and said stale reassuring things…as if I had a handle on anything.

One day a snowy egret lit on the pond, and we paused and watched in silence. John still took the time to notice things, though he told me that for a photographer it was all about the light, and he hadn’t seen the right light in a good long while. I thought about what I’d learned from him in his happier days: Eat well. Laugh hard. Bring friends to your table. Trumpet your indignation but forgive everyone. Cherish books, for they have souls. See beauty in the whorls and warps of weathered wood and windswept places, in the sun-bleached tidings of long-forgotten billboards, and sighing houses abandoned of their folk. Watch the sea. Remain amazed.

Now, in his grief, if John could still perceive beauty in the world, it brought him no comfort. All he knew with certainty was that fog obscured the landscape, and that Linda would always be gone.  One day, as we slogged up the steepest part of Alegria’s gravelly dirt road in howling winds, he stopped abruptly and cried out, “Why are we doing this?!”

“It’s what we do,” I said lamely. 

And maybe that was the right answer, because it is what we do: put one foot in front of the other and trudge up the miserable hill even if we can’t see what comes next.

But my therapy wasn’t working. More and more, John was resigned to sitting inside his beautiful house, overlooking lemon groves and a stunning view of the coast. He was paralyzed by depression, and spoke in monotone or simply wept. I was there one afternoon keeping him company in the living room, listening to his muttering and complaints, trying to fill in his empty spaces with my words. There was a knock at the door.

A little girl with black hair and a long pink dress stood there, holding a bowl of homemade menudo in her hands. It was Jennifer, the daughter of Ruffino, a ranch hand who worked in the lemon orchard and lived with his family in a small employee residence on the property.

“My mama says to eat this,” she told John.

 John accepted the soup with a bewildered thank you and turned toward the kitchen. 

“My mama says to eat it now,” said Jennifer. “It’s still hot. It’s good for you. I’ll come back for the bowl later.”

John removed a spoon from a drawer and set the bowl on the table. He sat down, peeled the plastic wrap from the top of the bowl, and proceeded to obediently eat. Steam rose from the bowl and I could smell the rich soup, redolent of tripe and onions and chili paste.  John said nothing, and spoonful-by-spoonful finished the soup. I don’t know if there was any pleasure in its flavor or its warmth, but I saw a tiny spark of the old John in his eyes, a spark so fleeting I might have imagined it, a wistful smile that never quite came to fruition. 

He took a nap with a full belly after that. And when he woke up, the orchard was dripping wet, webs of dew glistened in the whiskery air, and fragments of sky hung like rags in the black branches of trees. He rinsed the bowl, placed it on a step outside, and went back to wait for the light.

Maybe none of this mattered after all.

But we look in on each other…right? And we feed each other, and offer what sustenance we can. That’s all I know, even now–in fact, I know it now more than ever.

Whether it works or not, it’s what we do.