A Story from a Gentle Man Spanning Many, Many Years

He was a gentle man, a kind, soft-spoken, older, thoughtful man, with manners and a quiet grace.  He was by himself.  I had left the seat beside him at the airport gate about ten minutes earlier to use the restroom before we started boarding.  On returning, someone was sitting in the seat I had occupied, but the one on his other side was empty.  He looked up as I stood beside him taking off my backpack and our eyes met.  “I didn’t expect to find a seat here when I returned”, I said.  He smiled, softly.  “She just left a moment ago.” 

Settling down beside him, I asked, “Are you on your way home?”  He was.  He lived somewhere around the Kansas City area.  He told me the name of the town.  I just nodded as I don’t know really many of the names of the surrounding towns around Kansas City, and I don’t remember now as I write, though I think, perhaps, that it began with an “L”.  Perhaps irrelevant information to the story and my understanding, but by the tone of his words and the softness of his eyes, not to him.

I asked him if he was born and grew up in the Kansas City area.  He looked away from me – I sat barely a foot away from him in the now crowded gate area, many others milling about waiting to line up when their group was called – but in his eyes, in his mind and heart, as he began to speak, he was about 153 miles southwest of Kansas City on a farm in Kansas, where he grew up, raised by his grandparents, the farmland now leased out, but a place, he said, where he finds great peace when he visits the ponds on the land – there are two – as they were part of his life on the farm in the past.

He told me he had been in Charlotte for his grandson’s birthday, his son’s oldest child, as I remember, who was rambunctious as sin, which he said was okay.  I told him I had been in New York for my grandson’s fifth birthday and to visit his sister, my granddaughter, who was three, and that when together, they could truly be a handful.  I told him I was going to Kansas City for my oldest granddaughter’s wedding, and that my wife, still in California being with the two young grandchildren there, would be arriving in Kansas City on Friday, that I would pick her up, and that the wedding was on Sunday.

He told me his wife died nineteen years ago.  He has two granddaughters in Kansas City – ten and thirteen – and he spoke of them as his family, his reasons for living and breathing it seemed, and yet after all the years – nineteen – everything in his eyes, everything he said, was tinged by, and softly lit, by the death of his wife, for within his words was sadness and loss, making even more tender, it seemed, his natural inborn sensitivity.  A life formed by the peace of growing up on the soil of a farm in Kansas, by the lingering touch of his grandparents who raised him, and the death of his wife still missed in sorrow after nineteen years, an older man finding solace in the granddaughters he had nearby, and a man it was an honor to meet and listen to and share in the life he offered, all begun by a simple question of, “Are you on your way home?”.  For indeed he was, and he also returned to the deep home of his soul, by bringing forth in a few words, his life over many, many, years.

***

To View all Postings in Moments of Seeing & Occasional Pieces Please Use Link Below

Moments of Seeing & Occasional Pieces – Writing In The Shade Of Trees