I Have Been A Fool For Lesser Things, I Want You So Bad, I Think You Ought To Know That, I Intend To Hold You For The Longest Time

--"The Longest Time", Billy Joel

I don't know how long they've been coming to Bill's Pancake House in Manhattan Beach. It was my first time there and, from what I tasted, not going to be last. As I sat there finishing the last of my steak and egg breakfast, I spotted them. They were a couple in their sixties, maybe seventies. She was a patchwork old thing and he was this big, hulking lumberjack of a man. Yet to look at them, it was she who protected him. It was she who made sure he was loved and made safe.

I couldn't catch the words at first. Maybe she'd been reading to him the entire time I was eating breakfast. Perhaps it was the dying of the clatter of silverware that I'd been using to shovel the meal it to my mouth or perhaps it was that I regained my focus on the environment surrounding my food--whatever it was, it was only then that I realized exactly what she was doing for him. She was telling him of the preview of the NCAA Basketball tournament, how Florida and UCLA were going to match up that night. He soaked every word she uttered in like they were rain from on high. He made sure to ask her questions to clarify what he had just heard. He breathed in every pause of her breath, taking them as if they were cliffhangers in a movie, and waited patiently with every opportunity she took to regain her place or clear her throat. I imagined he would have waited till the end of time itself. He was enthralled with her voice. Or maybe he was just enthralled with her.

At first I asked myself if she was doing it because he had some disability. Maybe he had a hard time seeing the words in front of him or maybe he'd gotten a little slow and that it was hard for him to make sense of the article without somebody reading it to him. I started to imagine scenarios straight out of The Notebook, where it was some tragedy of fate that would speak to me of how true their love is. I began to picture the horrible accident that had left him unable to care for himself and how she had dedicated her life to assisting him with every task, every chore, that a grown man should be able to do for himself. I thought to myself, now that's dedication, that's love.

Then I realized that possibly there was no ailment, no impediment, or trial that this man was enduring. Possibly he was fully capable of reading the story himself and she just did it because she wanted to. That might even be a more pronounced statement of an individual's love for another, the fact she might be willing to do for him voluntarily what he could do for himself.

It's one thing to do something out of charity or to take care of himself. Yes, that is a form of caring and compassion. But so too is a powerful statement made when one person just is there for a person for no other reason because there is a bond between them.

As I stood up to walk out the door, I smiled a bit for the happy couple and kept my tongue still. It really didn't matter why she read to him or what circumstances brought it about.

All that mattered is the doing and the fact she'd probably keep doing it until time itself ended.

Yours Swimmingly.
mojo shivers