Last year there were two wise women in my life. One I visited in her home each Friday, and the other I drove to her appointments. They were in their nineties, and weathered their own share of storms. One kept a smiling photograph of her husband near her end of the couch. The other preserved her husband's voice on the answering machine. They have both gone on to join their beloved partners in heaven. I miss them.

Recently I have been able to spend a few hours each week with an elderly man. Often my schedule is firmly packed both before I arrive and after I leave. But the time in his home is as unhurried as an episode of Mr. Rogers. He even wears a soft brown sweater, no matter how warm it is. He enjoyed a long career as an English teacher, showing hundreds of boys the beauty of poetry and short stories. I am unsure of whether his forty years really were as idyllic as he remembers, or it is a perk of memory's filter. 

The other day he brought out an anthology of Robert Frost's works. He read to me of horses stopping in the snow, and a pair of paths in the woods. There were verbal pictures like a man hoisting rocks back in place, while wondering about the cost of a wall between neighbors. Another poem described a dog that leaps in the heavens with a star for an eye. 

Then he smiled. 

"This one is just two lines." I was curious. 

"We dance round in a ring and suppose. 

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

For a moment, I thought about the flurry that is my world. The news is more of a scramble these days than a waltz, and it includes the incessant commentary of people who pretend to know more than they do. 

Yet across the table from me was a gentleman whose life's questions are mostly settled. He is not rattled by events across the planet, or even across the road at the college where he was on the faculty for a while. He wastes no breath about paths not taken. The only wall between him and his neighbor is a rickety fence whose latch takes coaxing to close. His own loyal dog sleeps at his feet, unable to leap anymore since a car left one leg useless. 

But having faithfully walked the path before him, enabled him to make a difference.