My Finest Moment

My finest moment came in the summer of 1978. I was sixteen.

We were at Point Reyes, where several families had gathered for one of those all-day feasts that seemed to belong to another era, when people could surrender an entire day to eating, talking, wandering, and watching the light change. By evening, the sun had begun its descent over the Pacific. The wind came hard off the ocean, whipping clothes and blankets and carrying the cold bite of the sea. The waves churned below us as the sky filled with great washes of salmon, purple, and gray.

Nearby, a beautiful Asian woman stood with her baby. The child was inside one of those portable playpens that families used in the 1970s, a little fabric enclosure exposed to the gusts coming off the water. I watched the wind hitting the baby and felt uneasy. It seemed too harsh for such a small creature.

Without saying anything, I picked up a blanket and draped it over the side of the playpen facing the ocean, making a small wall against the wind.

That was all.

I remember the mother looking at me. Then she looked at my mother. The two women smiled at each other, exchanging that silent acknowledgment adults sometimes share when a young person has done something unexpectedly decent. No one praised me. No one needed to. I had seen that the baby was uncomfortable, understood what needed to be done, and quietly did it.

Nearly half a century later, I think of that moment with an intensity completely out of proportion to the event itself. I have accomplished things since then that would look far more impressive on paper. I have worked, taught, written, raised children, endured failures, solved problems, and accumulated all the cumbersome machinery of an adult identity. Yet somehow that sixteen-year-old boy at Point Reyes remains one of the purest versions of myself I can remember.

He wasn’t performing kindness. He wasn’t thinking about what his gesture said about him. There was no audience to impress, no photograph to post, no moral lesson to extract from the occasion. He saw a baby being battered by the wind and put up a blanket.

I remember how calm he was. How attentive. How naturally his attention moved away from himself and toward someone more vulnerable.

Sometimes I look back across all those years and wonder about him.

Who was that young man?

I miss him.