It is interesting when you live alone and you travel alone. Quiet becomes the norm. Observation becomes an intense skill. Longing for touch and talk never go away. Movement slows down. You learn that you have to get comfortable in your own skin.
In Los Angeles I was with a collection of friends that want to spend time together, eat and drink, and talk and catch up. Most I see once each year. What ended up happening is that my days were filled with people who I care about and enjoy.
At a luncheon I was sitting at a table of twelve between my friends Anna and Valerie. Another Jack Preager of Calcutta regaled us with a tail of how a long dead Mother Teresa made him sick through a boiled egg. The woman is obviously bound for sainthood because of such amazing powers. Jack, on the other hand, is not so enamored with her.
After he finished, another friend at the table, also named Jack but this one is from Columbus Ohio, asked me how my work was going. I hadn’t seen him in a year. So I told him about leaving Union Mission and being on this Sabbatical.
“Oh that must make your wife happy!” he exclaimed.
As many times as I’ve had to stop a conversation to explain that I became suddenly single I still never expect the question or am ready for it. There was a pregnant pause in what had been a light-hearted conversation. Jack’s eyes narrowed as he sensed something was wrong and my silence grew deafening in a second.
Under the table Anna placed her hand on my knee and squeezed. I glanced at her and she gave me a tender and sympathetic smile. On the other side Valarie leaned her shoulder against mine and her partner Gordon looked at me with concern. Maria Brown bowed her head. And even 80 year old Jack Preager, who has seen more sadness and death than the rest of us combined as he cares for the dying in the streets of Calcutta, looked at me and gave me a wink.
It all meant more to me than I could ever possibly put into words. Sometimes words fail writers.
So I cleared my throat and explained for the thousandth time that I now live alone. A blanket of sadness seemed to fall of the ceiling.
Jack Preager immediately launch into another story about a man in Italy who somehow came to own a few hundred Madonna’s that inexplicably came into his possession at the expense of a few hundred Cathedrals scattered across the Country.
That night these same people huddled around me in a bar after I’d gone out to dinner with Eamon and Leila. We drank and told stories and there was a great deal of touching and hugging. Jim Withers was with us and at one point someone took a picture of us which looks like a collection friends enjoying themselves. We all hugged and wished one another well when I said goodnight because of a very early flight home.
“Have a good day sir,” was my farewell from the hotel desk manager after I paid the bill.
Then there was silence… at the airport…on the plane…at another airport…
In Atlanta I sat at a bar between flights staring at my computer. I surfed through Face Book to check on my friends and the people that I love. I must have been pretty intense about it all because at one point, the young African-American bartender, put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me.
“I fixed you another one OK?” and he said it as though he were a Hospice worker caring for a dying patient.
And I leaned back to look at him and what I saw was a face full of compassion and concern, large cow eyes, looking for me to respond back to him. There were a thousand people rushing this way and that all around us. He was busy working serving the hundred or so who were demanding drinks from him. But he stopped everything for me. And I hadn’t even asked.
I nodded unable to speak.
And he nodded back.
And the word became flesh. And the holiness of love filled my broken soul. And that is reason enough to believe. Even when you don’t really want to.
