Devotion

In the eighties I worked at The National Trust for Historic Preservation. It was, for reasons large and small, my favorite job ever, and remains so.

At one point I worked in a little office all to myself that had belonged to the building manager, Charles Rotchford. He was an old New Englander, one of the most gracious men I ever met, probably somewhere in his sixties, with a shock of white hair and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses you could see coming around the corner.

He moved from his nice secluded office in the basement to a less nice one--and he ought to know, since he essentially designed the rearrangement. Through the office wall, I could often hear him on the phone.

His wife called every day at lunch, or if she didn't call, he called her. And dutifully, for about five or six minutes, he would tell her what he'd had for lunch.

It was the most banal conversation I ever heard in my life.

But it filled me--fills me--with envy. When I was young, I envied the obvious endurance of such love that one would care to tell (and one to hear) what lunch had been that day.

Now that I have experienced marriage, and life, and the range of human decisions about love, what I envy is the character, the integrity, the endurance of care.

Young, I felt they'd been lucky to find such love.

Older, I know they were lucky to have the stamina to keep it alive.

["The Linden Tree," image by Nicholas Durnan]