I remember when he used to ring the bell for mealtimes. He would ring it and then wait. Ring again, and wait. Waiting for nothing to happen. He had gotten used to nothing happening.

I remember when we were playing scrabble one night and Marc's younger brother, Kevin, asked him what had brought him to the Macrobiotic Study House in the first place and he had said 'brown rice', and I had smiled because I knew that he was telling the truth. But I was much more interested in Marc, who was from California and who wore his cap backwards and who told me that he had never met anyone like me before in his life. But Marc, in his own words, 'couldn't write for shit', and our correspondence ended shortly after I had returned home from America. Marc told me that I needed someone who could keep up with my word count.

Ben never told me anything about himself except that he grew up in Brooklyn, when I asked. I gathered that he had been working as a chef at the Study House for almost eight years, and I presumed that something in him was broken and that it was easier for him to hide away there than to risk living somewhere with something that nobody could fix.

I remember that he used to smell of alcohol on his days off and it made me sad. Valerie, one of the volunteers who was working in the kitchen, told me that Ben never lost his temper, ever, and I knew that his calm was more than just a little bit bordering on melancholy. When Valerie nicked her index finger with a knife, Ben bandaged it and said that everything would be okay.

I remember on one of our days off when I bumped into him at Walmart in one of the small towns surrounding the Study House in the Berkshire Mountains. I saw that he was buying some DVDs. Movies were his great escape, he told me. I noticed that one of movies that he was buying was Dying Young, and it made me even sadder. He asked me what I was buying and I said 'earrings' and we both realized how silly this was.

I remember when I was walking the grounds of the Study House one cold and sunny morning, and I saw him bringing raw vegetable peels and leftover grain to the compost heap, out the back, next to the garden that he was planting. He didn't see me.

'Raccoooon,' he shouted, but nothing happened.

'Raccoooon.' Nothing happened. He looked up at the sun.

A little while later, the raccoon, a juvenile who had become dependent on the human food waste of the Study House, appeared and Ben gave it its space to eat undisturbed. When he saw me, he told me that if you kept very quiet and very still, the raccoon would come and eat out of your hand when you offered it food. So, I kept very quiet and very still and the raccoon came to eat out of my hand. Ben laughed because he could see that I was happy there with him in the sun, feeding the raccoon.

I asked Ben why Thanksgiving was always on the last Thursday of November, and he shrugged and said that maybe it was because both Thursday and Thanksgiving started with a 'Th'. Ben showed me the difference between a penny and a dime, and together we counted up how many pennies are in a dime and how many dimes are in a dollar. I thought about how many Rands make up a hundred dollar bill.

When I left, I hugged Ben goodbye and told him that in a funny kind of way, I would miss him. He said that I should come back and visit but we never spoke again. I thought about writing him the other day, but I couldn't think of anything to say that would make it better.