April 2026. I landed in New Orleans and ordered my first-ever shrimp po’boy in the French Quarter, and boy was I sorry for every year I’d gone without one. I scarfed it down. Samir looked at me, amused. So did his daughters Ena and Leta and wife Vesna and sister-in-law Jasminka and the others at our side of the table, their fingers pointing at the rémoulade in my beard. I did not care. My stomach went from growling to stuffed inside three minutes and now I had the hiccups.
Three days there.
On the first we took a boat along the bayou and watched eight-foot alligators lurk like logs in the swamp. One three-footer lounged on an actual log next to a snapping turtle, like two buddies on a bench outside the corner store. Raccoons emerged from the forest at the edge of the swamp. Dozens of them, a boarding party with bad intentions. They wanted what our captain would throw them, some small sweet, and each of them picked it up with their paws—tiny, nimble human-like hands—and ate the way I ate the po’boy and then stood waiting for more. A few gators were maybe twenty yards off. One of them floated closer and two raccoons gripped the side of a tree and climbed fast. Not high. They knew their escape route. They knew how close to come for the sweet and how high to climb until it was safe to come back down.
The second day the thirty of us gathered in the lounge of The Revelry for a Soul Cabaret of our own making. Dunja had printed sheets of music, and we split into sections like it was high-school choir and we all sang, badly, and it was better for sounding bad. Nate got up and strummed his guitar, “My Croatian Man,” tune and lyrics his own, written for Samir on his sixtieth birthday, and we howled and Vesna choked on her tears and we rose to our feet at the last chord. Ralf, seventy-three years old, pulled up a chair in front of us and sat down, slow, and said aloud the thing he was most afraid to say:
“One day I will learn who I am, and realize I’m not all that.”
When he dies, he wants his ashes scattered between East 9th and East 10th Streets in New York, outside Charlie Parker’s apartment, and he charged us with making it happen, whether or not his family wants it.
Later that night we went down Frenchmen Street and ducked into a bar where the sound pouring into the night was too good to pass up. Jump blues. Their frontman looked like Jack Black’s cousin, and his eyes went wide when Ralf started to boogie to his voice and his little trumpet, to the electric guitar and drums and piano, the way a man boogies who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks. And yet I know Ralf cared, and he is better for having cared.
The last night we put on our best clothes and made our way to the wine room on the second floor of the Calcasieu. Al and Leta and Sarah emceed us through the slide show, featuring pictures of sixteen-year-old Samir all the way to sixty. We played trivia to see who knew the most about the man in the room whom this event was for. And I did not win—of course not—and his daughters did not win, and not even Vesna. His niece Alyssa did. And then Samir stood and came to the front of the room in his light blue seersucker suit, and he was about to give a toast, and it was going to be good because it was Samir, and everyone knew that at once and was quiet the way a classroom goes quiet when the teacher stands.
And what he did was say nothing of himself.
For the next ten minutes, Samir looked at each person in the room, all thirty of us, one by one, and shared a sentence written only for that person. “Here is what I learned from you.” He went around the room. “Al, from you I have heard it is better to be crazy than fearful.”
“Sarah, you have taught me how to be brave. When the apocalypse hits and I climb out of the rubble, if only one other human is left alive, I hope to God it is you, because you know how to take on the world.”
“Ralf, you have shown me nothing is too small, nothing is too big, and no one is too much.”
What he said made his daughter Leta cry. Ena cry. Alyssa, who knew him best, cry.
When he came to me, I wondered what he would say given he had known me less than a year.
“Jordan, from you I hear that if a person is patient, they will find the other world in this world.”
Samir blessed every person in that room with his words except one, and then he folded his paper and stuffed it in the lining of his jacket and looked at Vesna, because for her he had no words of his own.
And then “I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen came over the speakers and Samir took Vesna by the hand and he led her up front, and she was timid, and he was not, and he danced around her, “if you want a lover,” and then he was on the floor, “if you want to strike me down in anger,” and then he was on his feet again with his fists punching the air, “I will step into the ring for you,” and then he was right against her with an imaginary stethoscope in his ears, listening to her heart, “I’ll examine every inch of you,” and then he was on a chair and down off it and our eyes were on him and Vesna’s hands covered her face.
Until he stood before her, shirt undone and slipping off his shoulders. Along the top of his back were the words HER MAN scrawled large in black marker.
After that the room was fuller than full and my heart nearly thumped through my chest and wanted out, out, out and so I went out, went to the bathroom and the tears were coming now and I knew why and it wasn’t what Samir said, wasn’t the words although they felt good, it was what was in that room, thirty flesh-and-blood humans with the love leaking out of their pores into the air so thick it soaked my insides, and the last time I was in a room like that was with my wife and her family back when I was still married, and here I was again, three years later, where a different community had found me, and I did not think I would ever feel held in that way again, and all I could do was weep and say “thank you” as I stood over the toilet taking a piss, and the fan hummed, and the laughter came muffled through the door.
After a while I zipped my pants. I knew my way up the tree. I knew my way back down.
Vesna and Samir had gone on talking, and there was a smile in their eyes, a smile that passed to Rod and Allie and Kareen and Tanja and Sam and every soul in that room, and I stood by the door and watched, and I felt the world grow.
If you read this and wondered what sentence someone might write only for you, come find out. Samir and I are hosting Harvest Your Story, ninety minutes on Zoom, free, twenty seats. The gathering is on Monday, October 19, at noon Eastern.