Curiosity ~ Lucidity ~ Humanity
There are weeks in a life that you recognize, even as they happen, as something you will carry forever. We have had our share. But if Beth and I had to name one—one week above all others, across twenty-three years and three continents and more highs and lows than either of us can count—it would be this one. A track meet in Wollongong. A detour we nearly didn’t take. A knock on a door in the Victorian Alps.
Either of us could have called it off. Neither did. We pointed the car southwest.
Beth had four children. Giles was the one she had lost track of—not lost entirely, but lost in the way that happens with a particular kind of son: free-ranging, charismatic, unreliable in the most endearing possible way. He had left school after eleventh grade, worked casual jobs, cycled from Melbourne to Brisbane on his own—1,100 miles, sleeping rough along the way. I once managed seventy miles on a borrowed bike with no gear and considered it an achievement. He had a gift for people and a long string of girlfriends.
Beth’s last known address for her son was in Mount Beauty, a mountain town an hour north of Melbourne. Small towns yield their information if you ask the right people. We asked around and got an address and drove to it and Beth knocked on the door.
Giles answered.
He looked at her. A second passed, maybe two. Then something crossed his face—not surprise exactly, more like a door opening—and he stepped forward and put his arms around her. There was no dialogue I remember. There didn’t need to be.
He introduced us to his fiancée Krista—German, seemingly delighted to meet us—and another couple, friends of his. We agreed on dinner that evening. Giles was good company in the way that complicated people sometimes are—present, genuinely interested. Krista came to dinner and the evening went well. He told me, quietly at some point, that he understood something of what it was like to be on the outside of a family looking in. Beth’s daughters had not made it easy for me. He had noticed. It was a generous thing to say.
The next day we were out among the basalt formations around the town when the storm came in. It arrived the way alpine weather arrives: without warning and with complete conviction. The hail was large and serious and it fell without apology.
Giles moved without thinking. One hand came up to cover Beth’s face. The other covered his own. His long hair was soaked immediately, streaming down across both their faces, and they stood like that—both worried, both drenched—while I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.
We made it to the car—Beth’s dark green Hyundai—in seconds. The hail did five thousand dollars of damage to it anyway. I have taken a great many photographs in my life and I am particular about them. That one is among the best I have ever taken.
That evening we had arranged a second dinner. Krista did not come. No explanation was offered and none arrived. We were baffled—the day had gone so well. Giles accepted it with a rueful shrug, the gesture of a man accustomed to things arriving beyond his control. We went to dinner without her.
We drove back to Armidale. From then on, Beth and Giles stayed in close contact. Whatever had gone quiet between them was no longer quiet.
That was the week.
We almost didn’t go. But we did.
A few years later, unexpectedly, Beth received a call that no mother should ever have to receive.
It mattered that we went.
Curtis C. Morgan Bio-Fragment: I am eighty-three years old and still throwing things. Not in anger—in competition. I came to the weight throw late, after peripheral neuropathy ended a masters high jump career that once produced an American age-group record. Before that: forty years designing IT systems on four continents, a honey farm in Pennsylvania with four hundred hives, casual teaching at numerous schools Down Under, a six-foot unicycle I once could ride backwards in figure-eights. I have been profoundly deaf since childhood, which has made me a decent reader of lips and observer of faces. I live in Virginia with my Australian wife Elizabeth, a competitive racewalker who has never once suggested I slow down.