Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

What kind of life was it?

I guess for the homeless guys Torstein had befriended, it was sort of the same life they’d always had. They still panhandled for money for booze and went to the soup kitchen for their meals. For people like me and Pete and Maggie, who didn’t really have to struggle for a living, it was like going to school, in a way. We spent our days sort of learning from Torstein, then we went to our own homes at night. For the former stripers Tawny and Marigold, it was like halfway house. They were doing real jobs, but living with a successful woman who was teaching them how to be ladies — and they were also getting these sort of life lessons from Torstein.

After Story Hour, he’d sometimes sit down with his buddies in the park and tell his own stories ...

“Once upon a time there was a woman who collected the rare and priceless South Seas pearls. Her whole life was devoted to finding the best and largest and most perfect black pearls, and then she spent all she had just to posses them. She loved them. They meant the world to her. Over the course of her lifetime, she had collected 10 exquisite pearls, and she displayed them each on a separate platinum chain in her house, and only very occasionally wore one out.

“She lived in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. Can you say that Sully?”

Then he and Sully would stop and try to chant Rancho Santa Margarita, California, five times fast. It was sometimes a sort of chore to listen to one of his stories. But when they finally got over the hilarity of a city with that many syllables, he’d continue ...

“It’s a city on the San Andreas Fault and prone to earthquakes. Once there was an earthquake, and in the general shaking and shimmying of the house, one of this woman’s priceless black pearls became detached from its chain and rolled away! As soon as the shaking ended, she ran into the room and saw only nine precious pearls on their pedestals on their chains. On the last pedestal, just a broken chain was hanging. Terrified that she had lost one of her prized possessions, the woman began to scour the wreckage of the room, desperately looking for her pearl.

“You might think she’d be happy to have nine pearls. After all, each one was perfect and gorgeous. Each one was worth the price of a nice automobile. Together, just the nine of them accounted for a fortune. But that day, the only one which consumed her passion was the one which was lost. As much as she loved the other nine pearls — and she did — it was the lost one which needed her attention at that moment, and she gladly gave it. She crawled on her hands and knees through the debris left by the earthquake. She moved the furniture by her own brute strength, and even plunged her hands into the ashes of the fireplace grate just to be sure it wasn’t there. When she finally did find the errant pearl, down a hole in a rug under the sofa, she was ecstatic! She carefully cleaned it off, called up the jeweler to come over and repair its chain, and lovingly placed it back on display beside the others. What was lost had been found. The world was made new.”

“The world was made new?” Ferdy said. He was attuned to the fortune in the price of the pearls, and he would certainly have been crawling through the debris of an earthquake if even one were lost ... but, “How was the world made new?”

Torstein grinned at him. “Any time what was lost is found, the world is made new, Ferdy. When I found you, back in the day, that was a joyful moment, wasn’t it? That contributed to the sum total of all the joy in the universe. And that, my friend, makes the world new.” He turned back to Sully and said, “Why do you think she looked so hard to find the one pearl?”

Ferdy answered: “Because she paid a king’s ransom for it.”

“Because she loved it!” Torstein laughed, triumphant. “She had chosen it for herself, and she loved it for itself, and so nothing was going to take it from her if she could help it. It’s all about love, boys.”

This was a frequent theme with Torstein. He was all about love.

“Once upon a time there was a man with a metal detector, a treasure hunter. Every weekend he’d scour the countryside, looking for valuable relics, coins and jewelry. Sometimes he found a dollar’s worth of change, and sometimes he found a ring or a bracelet. But one day he was prospecting on some public land that was about to be put up for sale for commercial development ... and the metal detector started ringing off the charts for gold! From what he could tell, there must have been a pile of gold buried in that vacant lot. It was too much for him to dig up and take with him ... but the price of the lot was so high, he couldn’t afford to buy it for himself. He went home, sold his house and everything he owned, raided his retirement account and borrowed from a bank enough money to buy that lot. Because the treasure he found was worth, to him, all he had.”

“Was it worth more than his house and his retirement and enough to pay back the loan?” Ferdy asked. He would.

“It was worth the world to him. Look here. When you find a treasure, something worth the world to you, don’t hesitate to pay all you have to get it. That’s what you do to redeem something you love. It’s worth everything. You all, you’re my treasure in a field. You’re worth everything to me, because I love you. I’ll give all I have for you ... and you maybe don’t realize it now, but what you’ve found in me is worth all you have. And you’ll give all you have for it.”

At the time, I don’t think we understood what he was saying. It was only later that most of his stories made sense.