The Magnet and the Church Mouse


My friend Amanda is a magnet. The last time she visited Fern Forest, H and I took her to a neighborhood Fourth of July party. I’ve never been so popular as when I was standing close to Amanda. Sitting by the pond, we were surrounded by men who wanted to hear about her travels to Asia and India and her work with the Peace Corps. Women got her talking about her stays at Kripalu and about growing up on the Jersey shore. She practices yoga and meditates. Sometimes she eats tofu and raw veggies. Sometimes she pigs out on ribs and bacon. Always she’s vivacious and beautiful.

She was getting off the subway at the East Broadway station, walking up the stairs on her way back from yoga class. Abner was coming back from a class, walking unusually slow.

"Are you okay?" Amanda said.

"Yes," he said. "Just trying to get in touch with my muscles."

Who was this compassionate woman? Who was this man so tuned in to his body?

They talked. Then he asked her to go swimming. He grew up on the Lower East Side and knows of an Olympic size pool that’s free, and he took her there. He’s a strong swimmer and I imagine he looks pretty good in a suit. He’s fit and his Dominican bronze skin and long curly black hair charmed her.

What a couple they make. Blonde, cherubic Amanda is bubbly and funny with an underlying Jersey acerbic. Abner is pensive and exudes strength and wisdom. When I first met him, I checked his wrists for gang tattoos—he looked that dangerous.

“Are you in a gang?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I’m a church mouse.”

His father emigrated from the Dominican Republic and became a Pentecostal preacher on the Lower East Side, and Abner went with him to church every Sunday. When he was fourteen, Abner was riding on a flatbed trailer—a hayride with friends—and his foot got caught in a wheel. He was pulled off the trailer and his body wrapped around the tire as the truck rolled over him. His bones were broken, but he told his mother, I’m going to recover from this.

Through faith and will, Abner fought back. He majored in philosophy in college and enrolled in seminary but decided he’d be better at teaching physical education. He knows how the body can respond to dedicated work, and he wants to pass on to young people what he has learned.

Amanda has a generous heart and is driven to do good in the world. Yesterday she got on a plane for Trieste, where she’ll teach in an international school for a year. Abner went to see her at Jersey shore. They said goodbye on the dock, where he boarded the ferry back to Manhattan. Did she see tears streaming down his cheeks? Maybe. He speaks a little Italian, and perhaps he’ll visit her. Amanda’s a magnet, and I know she’s going to attract new adventures. And maybe some old ones, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sex and the Treehouse

Image
When Hana asked to book Fern Forest Treehouse for herself and three friends, H said there wasn’t room, the treehouse is only ninety square feet, he didn’t know how they’d sleep. “Oh, we’ll bring sleeping bags,” she wrote. “Don’t worry—we’ll fit in.” H is a pushover, especially for such youthful enthusiasm. And he thought it sounded like a good time. When the four gals pulled in from Boston around eleven Friday night, H was waiting up for them, the path to the treehouse lit by solar lamps, the treehouse itself all aglitter with colored lights. From upstairs, I heard excited giggles as he showed them around, more giggles as they climbed into the spa under a sky studded with a million stars. As happens in water at 102 degrees, the giggles calmed to whispers, and eventually all was quiet. The sun rose clear Saturday morning, warming the treehouse so that the girls were up a little after 7:00 a.m. We were still in bed when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom, and H and ...
Read more

Octopus Fishing in Portugal

Image
Ann was studying in Spain for a semester, living with a Spanish family. When the university had a break, Portugal called. It’s an old country, remains of the first settlements dating back to the Neolithic period, five thousand years before Christ. The Visigoths invaded in the sixth century. In 1986, the hills were covered in wildflowers, and horses grazed in fields crimsoned with red geraniums. On the southern coast of Portugal, the area of Algarve is dotted with small fishing villages. Santa Luzia, Tavira, Lisboa, Faro, Cape Sagres, Salema. From the gold dust beaches, one can look across the sea to the shores of Morocco. Bathers swim topless—young women, old women, bathing tops cast aside, breasts bared to the sun. Ann felt strange covering herself. She was just nineteen and modest, but she wanted to fit in, to be accepted, even among these strangers on the beach. She’d worn a one-piece tank suit but slipped the straps off her shoulders, rolled down the suit’s upper half, lay...
Read more

A Treehouse guest discovers his roots in an old millstone

Image
In spring 1794, a group of men set their shoulders to clearing land in what is now Lincoln, Vermont. The footpath they blazed into the forest eventually became a road named for the Quakers who came to settle with ox carts holding all their belongings. They were young, strong, and healthy. Once they pried rocks from the fields, they found the soil rich enough to support their crops. A year later, nearly one hundred residents, mostly from New York and Connecticut, scattered over 24,000 acres of wilderness, most living in tiny one-room cabins made from logs they hewed by hand from trees they had cut on their property. They cooked meals in stick-and-mud fireplaces, spun wool from their sheep, wove fabrics to make their own clothing, and cobbled shoes for their families. They hunted game in the forests and guarded their livestock from wolves that prowled the land. When the crops failed and game was sparse, they went hungry. Quaker services were held in homes until they built a m...
Read more