The stranger in the coffee shop had a tale of uncommon devotion

I sense a latent dorkiness creeping up on me in late middle age — an obsession with the sex lives of butterflies or the mood-enhancing benefits of bacon. Sort of an intellectual second puberty … a midlife astral plane.

Actually, it’s probably not so latent. It’s just out there.

While coffeeing the other morning, I started to marvel at the sun. Yeah, that sun, the one that lights the sky every day. Big deal, right? I mean, really. The sun?

Yet after careful contemplation I came to the rather unoriginal conclusion that Los Angeles is the Land of Light, just as Paris is the City of Lights or Chicago is the Windy City.

I suddenly got all philosophical about the California sun, how it burnishes the coastline, tints our foreheads. Perhaps no other city is so defined by sunlight. In L.A., sun is our soul point. Sun makes us smile, even as it threatens to fry our future.

Met Chuck that same morning, at the same coffee shop. A stranger at the next table sat before a small ceramic plate with an oversize pastry, to be enjoyed with a fat cup of steaming coffee. It also made me smile. For a moment, I put my Bible aside.

See, that’s how dorky I’ve become. Even in the big city, I chat up total strangers: “How’s your day going?” “Crazy election, huh?” “How about those Cubs?” Always incredible and inventive inquiries.

Chuck told me he’d been playing a lot of golf. “You play?” he asked. Not so well and not today, I said. Gotta go to the office. Gotta go make a buck. But thanks.

Chuck grunted at the very thought of all that. He didn’t have to worry about bosses or time clocks anymore. Chuck was retired, happily and voluntarily. He said he’d grown up here, attended college, then moved to New York for work. Eventually, he’d bought an old farmhouse in Connecticut, on three acres. Money became his sun.

Though a Californian, Chuck said he really enjoyed life back East — the trees, the seasons. The land was lush in spring and summer, dazzling in the fall. But the winters were longer than anybody really liked, and he was thinking of moving back here part time for a little more sun.

During his visit, Chuck had been golfing a lot, and he was almost the color of Cracker Jack. He looked the way all retirees should. Unhurried. Rested. Warm as morning coffee.

So what kind of work had he done?

Chuck said he’d hit it big in sales for IBM, in the gold rush of mainframe computers in the ’60 and ‘70s, back when there was a covenant between a big company and its employees. Back before “outsourcing” became the dirtiest word in America.

IBM made a buck. Chuck made a buck too. Back then, everybody seemed to make a buck.

Sometimes, a buck isn’t enough, though. Read your history. Study your czars. Greed gets you every time, and right now it’s got America by the throat.

But that’s another story, not this one. Chuck worked hard, enjoyed a good career, and now he was back here in L.A., where he’d grown up running in the orange groves of the San Gabriel Valley.

“What brings you back?” I asked.

He paused. He sipped his coffee.

He was here, he said, to tend to his ex-wife. Help see her through an agonizing stem cell transplant at City of Hope. That hadn’t helped so much. Now more chemo, more agony. Then … who knows?

“It’s the same cancer Tom Brokaw has,” he explained. Multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.

Every life crashes and burns a little. Luck runs dry. No one gets through unscathed. Chuck explained how he’d stay with his ex-wife on those long days when her current husband needed to go home to rest a little.

I already liked Chuck, but in that instant — in that revelation — I liked him even more.

Marriage is hard. It succeeds pretty rarely. When it fails, the scars are often nasty and long-lasting. How many of us would have the decency and character to come back the way Chuck has?

What a lesson for the kids. Or for other couples. Even for the oncologists tending to his broken wife — a glorious little gesture in a nearly godless situation.

Most of all, what a way to comfort a loved one.

A perfect ray of sun.

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Twitter: @erskinetimes