Behind You, Chef

For Anthony Bourdain

Behind You, Chef

And there you were again this morning, in the shower, towering over me, doing the Snoopy dance, as if you’d decided to give life one last chance, glancing out the window at an old California oak that remained mostly still through a howling windstorm. And then, just as quickly, the mist broke and you disappeared, evaporated into a tea tree scented steam. Death shouldn’t smell this clean and invigorating.

Out, out, damn ghost.

We were still dating, the missus and I, when we visited Les Halles, late one fall, the same year we discovered you, the Neue and the Fitzgerald’s – Zelda and F Scott, on the wall at the Monkey Bar, stalling - elegantly buzzed in perpetuity.

By then, you had departed the kitchen for Beirut. Singapore. Barcelona. Hong Kong. For warthog, maggot fried rice, beaver, the cold heart of a cobra.

Over an open fire, surrounded by strangers, deep into a forest, or darkened by a shoreline, your silhouette encircled by bodies, shadows against a sinking sun locked in a thick fog.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson.

Your land of the lost was not the wild, untamed places. The unknown faces. The foreign tastes and smells. No, it was the swelling ankles weighed down by the everyday, the ordinary. The sofa. Complacency. No new places to see. Or touch. Just too much domesticity. All of it so sobering.

The globetrotting. Now, that’s where it was at. Never old hat. Everything always new and exciting. The mighty call of the ever-changing, ever-revolving, ever-evolving Mothership Earth, which you boarded for the wildest ride. When Life still deserved that capital letter. When it was better than it became in the end. When suddenly, the earth stood still, and you saw life for what it is.

That’s where the rose-colored glasses come in. They simply must. They have such a beautiful blind trust. How they help measure out the longest hour in minutes of incense swirls marking the light through the windows, through the old curtains your wife curses and wants to replace with drapes she’ll make---someday. In seconds of music through the headset, the plainest of minutes rendered fleeting by a catch in the throat. The remote pangs of missing any of this. At all. The minutes that don’t fall through the cracks of the day, that play out like the most entertaining live show; the unexpected glow of a succulent’s leaf taking a piece of the morning sun. I won’t hold onto you, but I love you. And Now I am ready for the next one.

And the next one after that.

I miss you, tall man. Why was it so hard when we all learned you went that way?

Because we saw ourselves in you; the longing to connect, the willingness to try, even despite the fear. It’s what we all had in common through you. And, so when you left, we knew your pain. And the added pain of staying. Of remaining.

All hail the long remaining.  

And we love you always.