After our dad died in November, my sister posted this on Facebook:
Well. For reasons I cannot yet explain, every time I think of that phrase, “he never met a stranger,” it brings me to the edge of tears. For a while, full on tears.
I just spent a week on a different beach at a place called Isla Holbox, a 26-mile long island off the tip of the Yucatan. I say 26 miles long, but most of that length is an ecological preserve, and the one town, toward the western end, has around 2,000 permanent residents. I had been there about eight years ago, after which I was so determined to preserve its relatively unknown status that I refused to tell people where I had been. As if I was some sort of un-Canute, holding back the tide by not telling it anything. A year or two later I saw, crestfallen, that the New York Times named it one of 52 places to go that year.
So I finally got back this year. And I will tell you, with some hesitation, that although it has changed, it’s still pretty idyllic, for now anyway. Don’t make me regret writing that. Chief among its virtues are that it is a place that practically enforces unplugging, so that’s what I did.
I read, I wrote, I collected some stories and invented others. Here is the first of them.
I was walking on the beach, to the west of el centro, the center of town. Eight years ago you could stroll to the end of the island, if you didn’t mind a little wading in spots; now you make your way dodging beach clubs and resorts where you occasionally trespass slightly (although my own politics, regardless of the law of Mexico, say that nobody owns the beach). Eventually I came to a spot where it appeared there was no going further without swimming, and turned back. Which was fine; the sun on my neck was telling me it was time to broil the other side a bit.
I had passed a man selling mangoes and pineapples from a little table under a palm tree. I had probably said buenos días to him as I went by. Now I was coming back toward him, and saw three young adults, such as visit Holbox these days, buying a mango on a stick. I decided I could use some water; then decided I didn’t want a plastic bottle and some fruit would serve as well. I considered my options (which also included Takis, to my dismay, but that’s the world) and chose a mango, like the folks before me.
“Es maduro?” I asked. “Oh, sí, muy dulce,” he replied.
He looked over at a younger guy, maybe 18, lying awkwardly in the shade, looking as if he’d had a bad night or maybe a worse morning. I thought I saw disappointment, nearly disgust, on the fruit-seller’s face. His son maybe? His burden, it appeared.
He pulled out an ancient looking knife with a wooden handle, kind of a small machete. It reminded me of the knives that somehow ended up filling my parents’ kitchen, handmade, oddly-shaped and unusable. I think they came from my grandfather. The fruit-seller’s looked a bit better, and he knew how to cut with it, but still the sight of it made me not want to distract him, so I just watched until he was mostly done.
But I finally I made some dull comment, probably about the weather. “Que día bonito” or some dumb thing you might say to a fruit-seller. We chatted a bit, and he explained about the tropical storm that was sending the wind out of the north, bringing us cold water and worse, sargasso, the long sea grass that can pile up on the beaches of the Yucatan and rot there. He cut the mango into a lovely flower with bite-sized petals. We chatted a bit more; I gave him my formal “Que tenga un buen día,” and went on my way, mango juice dripping down my face. (It was, indeed, muy dulce, considerably better than the more expensive mango I had at one of the fancy places a couple days later.)
I wondered if the three folks who had been there before me had a conversation, or did they just wait patiently or talk among themselves while he was working. I don’t know, maybe. But it seemed likely they kept to themselves on their opposite sides of the table.
Many years earlier, a friend and I were at a fast-food place, a Steak-and-Shake, and we were waiting for our food, and I struck up some inane conversation with the person at the counter. I can’t tell you what it was about, the virtues of their strawberry milkshakes or something. We walked out and my friend said to me, “Why did you just turn into your dad in there?” At the time I it made me feel like a client of the guy in the Progressive Insurance commercials, trying to keep people from chatting in elevators and calling their signature their “John Hancock.” That I was turning into everyone’s parents, turning fifty before his eyes and my time. Maybe that is what he meant.
But now I think: no, I’m doing my best to turn into my dad. The guy who at the Cincinnati Bengals’ training camp casually turned to Archie Griffin, the biggest football star Ohio State has ever had, and said, “Hey Arch, where’s the bathroom?” like they were co-workers. The guy who was thought NPR’s Frank Browning was interesting and kept telling me I should look him up in Brooklyn - like, what was I going to do, drop by Frank’s house and say, “Hey, my dad says we should meet”? Well, my dad learned Frank Browning had a farm in Kentucky and drove down there to meet him, and apparently they had a nice visit. My dad was the guy who went to Nepal and made a friend called Bodhi that he stayed in touch with for most of the rest of his life; went to Tierra del Fuego and looked up a woman whom he had read about in the National Geographic; had a friend who was a coffee farmer in Kona. The guy who had something like 300 people at his retirement party.
On a beach in Holbox I had a conversation with a guy selling fruit (and Takis) and even if it was about nothing, it was human and it made my day a little brighter, and hopefully his, and made us slightly less than strangers. I’m ok if keep turning into that guy.