Pay it forward: a debt.

In the local coffeeshop, a stranger kicks up a conversation, and we bat around our mutual appreciation for this early summer – the blossoms profuse. He buys his order and adds my coffee, too. Pay it forward, he says, and vanishes into the morning.

I take my coffee to the courtyard down the street, empty at this time of day. Ahead of me, after this bench work stint, the day sprawls. I move from eddy to eddy.

In the late morning, a friend I haven’t seen in a few years calls. I’m now in a dim basement room. As we talk, our conversation dips into the past. I feel as if I’m lifting silty strands of stories, stringing them through my hands, searching for clues to tie pieces together.

All day long, I ponder our conversation, how the actions of one person ripple through friends and acquaintances, shift through strangers’ lives, how I’ve always been interested in this since I was a teenager, holed up in my parents’ hammock, reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Later in the day, still stuck on this, I stack firewood, listening to news about the Trump trial. In the hot June sunlight, the freshly cut wood is redolent with sap. An earthworm wriggles. The neighbor boys bike into my driveway, circle around through the grass, ever curious about whatever mundane thing I’m doing. Overhead, those turkey vultures circle their late afternoon sweep, ever hungry. Little snapshot of my terrain.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story.

— John Steinbeck