on assembling a hammock

image by janis blums

I met him at a dance jam on a Saturday morning in January, in San Rafael, California. We did not speak that day, but attempted some awkward partner dances, banging into each other, twirling in the wrong direction. He was not skilled at this type of dancing, but he had a kind smile. He was handsome, but he was not prowling the floor.

I learned later that Les went home and wrote in his journal: “Went to ‘Sweat Your Prayers.’ Fell in love.”

“We had such a special connection!” he told his sister Lea, “The way she looked into my eyes.”

“It’s Marin,” Lea said. “Everyone is like that.”

A week later, we danced again, and afterwards, introduced ourselves and agreed to go out for lunch. First we drove to Home Depot to buy a ladder Les needed and then we had some terrible food at a café next to the 580.

After that, we became friends. Les was in the midst of a divorce from his wife of twenty-seven years and had just moved from Oregon to be near his sister and aging mother. He was badly wounded by the separation. He was sixty-one years old, bearded and lanky, looked and felt like someone I could have met in Harvard Square. I was forty-three. 

After a few get-togethers, I let him know that I did not see us becoming involved. We were walking on Concrete Pipe trail in a light rain. Our age difference was too big, I explained, and we were in different places in our lives.

When I called Les to go for hikes, he said yes. When he moved into a house-share by the creek in town, I sat on a futon on his bedroom floor while he built shelves. When I complained about the anxiety I was experiencing in a dance floor romance with someone I’d met just before him, he listened thoughtfully, and offered encouraging words from books he was reading about relationships.

One Saturday in May after dance and lunch at India House, where we often went, I asked Les if he wanted to come back to my place and help me put my hammock out. In the garage, I showed him the hammock and enormous box that contained its heavy metal stand, saying that I usually carried things out in pieces. Les picked up everything at once and asked me to point the way.

Moments later, my housemate Jessica and I giggled in the kitchen while Les began carefully assembling the hammock and stand on the deck. There was something about his dogged, reliable nature, the way he lifted the entire box.

“It just seems like it would be such a relief for you and Les to be together,” she said.

Turns out, she was absolutely right.