My two oldest are off at college and the nearly autumn sky is flat gray and the candy green tree leaves hang heavy in the humid air, worn out from all the heat. I am all too eager to dump summer at this point, to turn my back on it and wait for crisp mornings and cleared cornfields, wide open places that let you see all the way to the faraway hills. I count down the days to fall. But the fireflies remain (in lesser numbers), and the grass is still growing.
We are weather watchers this time of year, my family and I. When the 10-day forecast reaches into the dates of the Maryland State Fair and, after that, the Frederick County Fair, where we have concession stands, we pray the rain will hold off, the summer temps will abate, and that any stray hurricanes and tropical storms will peel back off into the Atlantic. Every cool morning elicits the comment, “Feels like the fair,” and every rainy day pulls our eyes back to the forecast. How long is this supposed to last? What time of day will it rain? Rain in the morning is fine. Rain in the afternoon and evening can ruin an entire day’s sales.
I eagerly wait for fall, but I remember it is not yet. I remember again, as we set our table with six place settings, that our two oldest are at college. The table that used to be completely full now has an empty end, and we slide closer together.
The fireflies come out, glowing in the humid air. Even the moon looks weary of the summer, barely able to muster the strength to rise above the tree line.
I recently found out that the woman who hired me for my very first job out of college, Susan Schweizer Andrews, the woman whose decision led Maile and I to move to Jacksonville, Florida, a few weeks after we were married in 1999, has died at the age of 62.
She had bright red hair and her skin burned instantly in the sun and she talked a hundred words a minute, laughing all the while. As my friend Rich said, she had the best stories and yet always professed at being mortified by what happened in them. When we moved to Florida, she treated me like a four-star recruit who had decided to play football at the college where she coached.
I haven’t seen Susan for years, though she often commented on my writing. Two reactions surfaced when I heard the news—sorrow and resignation. Susan is another in a long string of losses dealt to us by 2023: Jup and Leslie and others. Two kids off to college. Even Cormac McCarthy died, one of my favorite authors of all time. Again I wonder if this is life at 46 and beyond.
The world feels like a different place now. It feels . . . incredibly temporary.
And in the middle of all of this, life goes on. And fall approaches. The fairs return. We watch the weather.
While serving customers at the Maryland State Fair just the other morning, an older gentleman approached. He was a little shorter than me with thinning gray hair, glasses, and kind eyes. He smiled and, in an accent I thought I recognized, ordered a bottle of water. I asked him if he was enjoying the fair. He said that he was.
“Are you from Iran?” I asked.
He gasped, audibly. His mouth dropped open. He reached across the aisle and took my hand.
“How do you know this?”
“It’s your accent,” I said, smiling, slightly embarrassed. “I have Iranian friends, and I wrote a book about Iranian Christians, where they told me their stories. I guess I just recognize your voice.”
He was speechless.
“Let me go get your water,” I said.
He clutched his hands to his chest, as if I had given him a gift and he was worried that someone might try to take it.
Later, his wife came over and thanked me. “He doesn’t cross paths with many people who know anything about Iran,” she explained, smiling. I followed her out to where they were eating.
“So, how did you end up here, in the United States?” I asked him.
“Now, I might get emotional,” he warned me, and his eyes did indeed tear up, and he told me a brief version of his story, how he came to the US to get his PhD in 1978, one year before the Shah left Iran and the Ayatollah took power. He told me how he has lived here for the last 35 years, “tinkering,” he said (“He’s actually an engineer,” his wife interjected). He lamented how almost no one ever recognizes his accent. No one hears his voice and knows where he is from.
Back at the pretzel stand, the kids were buzzing at the man’s reaction. “When you asked if he was from Iran, he held his hands to his heart!” my daughter exclaimed. “What a dear!” They wondered why it meant so much to him, that I knew where he was from by the sound of his voice.
I paused. I wasn’t sure what to say.
But I know what I would tell them now: I think we all want to be known. We all want to be recognized for who we are, at our very core. Especially when we’re far from our childhood home. Maybe when I recognized his accent, for him it was a little like being found.
These are the unlikely joys that can happen in a life that at times feels so full of loss. Children grow up and set out on their own. We receive news that someone we knew well, long ago, has died. And then, in the middle of the Maryland State Fair no less, a man buying a bottle of water can feel found again.
In Letters by a Modern Mystic, Frank C. Laubach writes about encountering a “painted woman” on a ferry. He tells her he is looking for God, and she replies, “God is everywhere around us and in us if we only open our eyes. All the world is beautiful if we have eyes to see the beauty, for the world is packed with God.”
Reflecting on this moment, he says, “I am going about the world trying to find wonderful hours, and I shall remember this as one of them.”
I will remember my chat with this kind Iranian man as one of my own wonderful hours.
When have you last had a wonderful hour?
So tender
This was a lovely reflection of life. Thank you!