Old conversation

So many years ago, a man we didn’t know well asked my husband, “Do you believe in God?”

The question seemed as bizarre and out of place, as if frogs had suddenly rained down on our plates.

We’d barely sat down in a frumpy, family-owned Italian restaurant in a small Pennsylvania town, glasses of bitter chianti between us, the old-rounded humps of the appalachian range outside the window, waiting, listening for the answer.

I felt my husband, a wildlife biologist, his taxonomic mind sorting out the moment, his body tense as a buck with a heavy rack of antlers, exposed and wanting to bold.

In the awkward silence that I made no attempt to fill, knowing yet not knowing how he might answer, I stared through the lovely, plumy color of the chanti at my husband’s hands, warped and purple, twisting and twisting the stem of his glass.

He didn’t say, no.

“The forests and the rivers,” he offered calmly, “the birds, the mammals, the fish, the mountains and the oceans, those are my god.”

Another awkward pause, waiting for further probing, a possible debate, some persuasive effort. Conversion, a communion of chianti and ciabatta.

“Oh,” the man said.

And that was it.

The waiter came with menus. The conversation turned to golf scores and travel. The sounds of forks tapping plates filled in any other quiet gaps, as we made our way through bland pasta to the sweet tiramisu, and out to the parking lot where we said good-bye.

Why this memory emerges now, who knows?

After more than 25 years, curious, I ask Google to search the man’s name, as he’d been something of a community leader and likely still in local news stories. Up pops his obituary from nearly 4 years ago.

Apparently he loved flying small planes and once invested in lobsters. Like all in death, he was loved by everyone. Among the mentions of career and family, a reference to mental health and that he was an Episcopalian.

“I guess you believed in God,” I whisper, looking at his smiling face above a crooked bow-tie on the screen.

“Where are you now? Any clues you can share with the rest of us?”

Outside this windowed room, wind walks through the tips of redwoods, saying, Hush, hush, hush.