In this seaside community in Beautiful British Columbia (as their license plates proclaim) where my mother- and father-in-law retired, seventy-five steel steps separate the trail where the staircase begins and the beach that lies below at the foot of a steep embankment. I know them well. Making the descent with creaking knees, it’s hard to get down seven steps, never mind seventy-five, and the route back up requires real resolve, but that’s the way home.

A year ago, as I picked my way down like a pirate walking the plank, I was passed by a couple on their way up. I don’t want to call them elderly; I’ll be generous and say in late middle age they were sporting a vigor and a glow, though the latter may have been the glaze of perspiration on their foreheads.

“Lotta stairs, huh?” I said, wheezing.

“We do this five times a day,” the woman replied.

“Five times?”

“Every day,” she said. “Five down, five up.”

“That’s impressive,” I said.

And it is.

Established that I was visiting from Brooklyn, we exchanged generalities. Maybe talked about the weather. They went their way. I went mine.

I retreated, so to speak, to my corner. Working as a bartender in my own late middle age, praying (asking), meditating (listening for answers, as if there were any), and working out, if you can call what I do these days working out. But for the most part consigned to my home office, to a disordered interior life, oversubscribed to legacy media and social media, gambling on horse races, grasping, as ever, for something that might be worth writing about. Ruminating over the mystery of it all. I would like the world to see me as a man of action. I am a man of thought.

All this is the long way of saying another year rolled by from that encounter on the steps, another Christmas, another dolorous New Year’s Eve. Grown older still through the dim winter, fighting the self-pity that insists I have supped on more than my portion of rejection, of disappointment and bitterness. Of disillusion.

Fretful yellow tips of daffodils peered up in March, a false spring of sorts, hesitating with the rest of us while our berserk political season unfolded. Unnecessary to go on about it, we all know what happened, what’s happening.

And then it was summer, and once again, as I was tiptoeing down those steel steps, this time with my daughter, that same couple was making another of their daily ascents. The woman called out to me, “Is that the gentleman from New York City?”

Little bit of a stretch the use of “gentleman,” but my daughter answered for me. Affirmative.

“Oh, please,” the lady said. “Please. Can you wait for me? I have something for you.”

My daughter had wanted to swim at a different part of the beach, but I argued for this strip, which was familiar to me. The couple was conquering the final few steps of their day. This was our last night in town. A confluence of maybes and what-ifs had brought us together at the last possible instant. Thirty seconds more or less, we’d have missed one another. Coincidence?

I told her we’d meet down at the beach. Five minutes later, she and her husband putt-putted up in their environmentally friendly vehicle. She got out and presented me with a Ziploc baggie. It was filled with rocks.

Through a series of geological events, this part of the world took shape during the Mesozoic Era, which stretched from 252 to 66 million years ago. Not unreasonable to think these rocks, collected from that beach, are among the smallest remnants of that age. The woman had administered some sort of treatment that smoothed and polished them to reveal their essential nature, shot through with veins of russet and sea foam green. In the softening light—it was late in the day—I could see them truly.

“They’re kind of spiritual,” she said.

“They are kind of spiritual,” I said, thinking the rocks must mean drastically different things to each of us. Or maybe not. Nearly 200 million years might not be an eternity, but it’s got to be pretty close, and what possesses more of the Spirit than the eternal?

I can hardly claim to be impressive, and even if I thought I were, I wouldn’t say it. I do try to address everyone I meet with respect. But something about me, our first chance encounter, or more likely something about her inspired her to collect and process several ordinary pieces of stone, and then cart them around in her car for the better part of a year with the hope—the hope—she would meet me again, in order that I should have them. Hope is sublimely spiritual. Springing eternal and all of that.

Their vehicle sputtered off, and with it the leavings of those leaden winter mornings, the luckless afternoons at the racetrack, the brooding over what could reconstitute my energy for writing—all borne away by this aging child of God, stardust and golden.

Joni Mitchell said that. She’s Canadian, too.