The sentimental heart
A neighbor asked me to write an article about Faubourg St. John. I wrote it and sent it off to him to send in, and he wrote back that the last paragraph made him cry. He said he was perhaps overly sentimental but I know that it is, indeed, me. Yesterday on my plane ride into Detroit, which was the first stop on a long journey trying to get to New York after this weekend’s storms, I sat next to a retired man who wanted to chat.
I tried the usually confusion of trying to open my Sunday NYT loud and long, and flipping through my book with incredible interest, but he wanted to chat and sometimes there is no refusing a chatty neighbor. He said he was a country boy who had come to the city to make big money, but that his heart resided in the country. I understood.
He said that he had four children, including a son who had died at 32 of diabetes. The son had gone blind and then lost a limb and then eventually he died. He said his wife had also died. She had hepatitis and couldn’t hold off for a transplant and so she died. He said he had grandchildren to help him cope. I understood.
He said that his daughter had bought a franchise in New Orleans and had opened four Little Caesar’s stores. Not even sure what that is but I said isn’t that nice to be polite. He said that she was very successful and that even though she had opened her first store right when Katrina hit, she ran back to see that the place was opened only weeks afterwards. He said she felt that New Orleans was her home now. I understood.
He put his head back on the chair and said that he was retired now, and that he looked forward every year to going back out to the country to some land he owned and opening up his cabin and beginning the fishing season. His grandchildren would come visit him there. It brought a tear to my eye to know that this man had pretty much just summed up his life and that he was living in the home stretch, happy but sad, alone but with family, and he had a story to tell, his own story about his own life that he was willing to share with someone he had never met before just to pass the time and say it aloud – almost to hear it told for his own benefit.
I understood.