I was stranded, waiting for better weather to cross the bar and make my way south around Cape Mendocino. Tired of my canned Costco boat food, I somehow found my way to Hurricane Kate's ("Dining with a twist") in downtown Eureka. It was an amazing lunch, and I was so immersed in my sweet potato fritters that I almost didn't notice you come in, but the host and the chef made a show of welcoming you at the door, like they knew you well, saw you often. You may have been a starlet in the fifties, and even at seventy, eighty, you carried yourself like a princess in the best sense of the simile - the Grace Kelly / Diana sense.
Your hair was mostly white. You wore expensive gray pants and against the backdrop of a black turtleneck you wore delicate and sensible lunchtime pearls. The host seemed to ask you with a look of concern: "Where is ... today?" and you smiled sweetly, looked down a bit. You might have suggested that he was under the weather. But somewhere behind your smile there was a bit of sadness, like his weather was somehow, brutally, more permanent. I couldn't help thinking of a story from several years ago on This American Life: a couple is together for over fifty years, and when she dies he follows, naturally, the next day, exactly as he said he would. It's hard to believe, sometimes, that sort of love exists.The host seated you alone at a table by the window, and for several minutes I just watched you. You stared out the window as if you were waiting, and I wanted to join you or ask you to join me, to listen if you wanted to talk, even if not about him but about anything. I was sure you had stories to tell.In the end, after all, you were joined by someone who must have been your daughter, and I stopped thinking about you as much and started considering what it would be like to be so loved, so taken care of, so fussed about before you dressed and reluctantly left my bedside to meet our daughter for lunch. And even if I only conjured him, creating the backstory of his sickness and inferring your concern, to be able to imagine the accomplishment of something like your love was well worth the walk from the marina and the price of a long, thoughtful lunch.
