I had rented a furnished apartment on Franklin Avenue near Drake Park. It had a small balcony, enough space for a chair and a little table. I sat there with a cup of coffee that first evening, looked toward the mountains, and thought, Hello.
Just that.
Hello.
I did not know a single person in Bend, Oregon.
I was sixty-eight years old. Recently retired from twenty-eight years as a civil engineer with the city of Indianapolis. Financially stable because of a pension, careful savings, and the sale of the house.
I had no obligations to anyone within eleven hundred miles.
I will tell you honestly, it was the most frightening and most relieving morning of my life.
And those two feelings existed together without contradiction.
The first three months were quiet in ways I had not anticipated.
Not lonely, exactly. I have always been comfortable with my own company, which is either a gift or a warning sign. In this case, it became a gift.
I walked the river trail in the mornings.
I cooked real food for myself because I like cooking and had spent too many years doing it only for other people. I discovered that cooking for yourself without an audience has its own quiet pleasure.
I read.
I slept better than I had in years.
In July, I walked past a building on Hawthorne Avenue with a sign in the window.
Bend Woodworking Co-op. Members welcome.
I had done woodworking as a hobby for fifteen years. Furniture, mostly. Small pieces. The kind of work that requires patience and precision and rewards both.
I had stopped after Carol died. Partly because I had been too busy showing up for other people, and partly because the workshop in the Broad Ripple house felt too quiet without her moving around in the rooms beyond it.
I walked in.
The co-op had twelve members. They ranged in age from thirty-one to seventy-four. They had a shared workshop space, shared equipment, and a monthly meeting where people showed what they were working on and helped one another solve problems.
It was the kind of conversation that happens naturally when people are doing something with their hands and are not performing.
I paid the monthly fee.
I started coming on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
Within six weeks, I had been invited to a member’s birthday dinner at a restaurant on Bond Street, attended a weekend river camping trip organized by three co-op members and their families, and been given the unofficial title of the guy who brings coffee because I started arriving early with a thermos.
Nobody assigned me that role.
I chose it freely because I wanted to.
That was the difference.
One Tuesday morning in August, I was pouring coffee for a thirty-four-year-old furniture maker named Tom, who had just finished his first dovetail joint and was unreasonably proud of it.
Choosing it because you want to, I thought.
That is the difference.
In September, I set up a table at the Bend Farmers Market on NW Hawthorne Avenue and began selling small pieces. Cutting boards. Side tables. A set of stools made from reclaimed pine.
I priced them honestly, not cheaply.
The second Saturday, a woman appeared at my table and stood looking at a small side table I had finished in tung oil.
Her name was Ruth.
She was sixty-two, recently retired, and had moved to Bend from Portland two years earlier for roughly the same reasons I had moved from Indianapolis. A life that needed more air in it. A place that looked like it might provide some.
She had the quality of someone who had made a considered decision and was at peace with it.
She looked at the table, then at me.
“Did you make this?”
“I did.”