We’d progressed from walking in the park to perching across from each other in my living room to sitting side by side on the family room sofa. It was grief that drew us. A year earlier we’d both lost our beloved, vibrant spouses to cancer. Though his wife and I had been in the same women’s book group, I’d known Eric only through the wry gripes we’d all made about our husbands.

Now he took my face in his hands. Here it comes, I thought. Was I ready for this? Looking deep into my eyes he asked, “Would you nap with me?”

Apparently, this was what dating looked like in one’s 60s. As he snored companionably, I wondered how I’d handle our next progression, whatever that would be. My husband had devotedly nursed me through my own illness, only to be hit by one far worse. We and our two sons had been the closest of families, their father their best friend. As much as I knew they needed me, I was racked by survivor’s guilt — ashamed still to be alive. If I was mortified just to breathe, how could I even think about loving another man?

For months, Eric and I lurked about. Although he lacked the sense I had that we were cheating on our spouses, we both felt we were somehow cheating on our children. That his one child and my two were often at our respective homes made for tricky logistics. So we leased new life from the city.

Guided by Eric, we watched planes from the viewing deck at the Santa Monica Airport, where he explained Bernoulli’s principle. We wandered the Mar Vista Farmer’s Market, where he introduced me to the vendors he’d known for decades and taught me to top berry trays with tiny nets he’d made to hold the fruit in place. We saw L.A. Theater Works record plays at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, where the primal storytelling of actors reading lines and Foley artists adding sounds riveted me more than a Broadway spectacle. On these outings, I learned not just about flight, farm-to-table and fabulism, but about Eric. He was a man fully engaged in life.

Guided by me, we took classes at Santa Monica Yoga, Eric treating himself afterward to a sandwich at Bob’s Market from the deservedly self-proclaimed Deli Lama. We walked our way through my L.A.-on-foot book, from Castellammare and Leimert Park to Pasadena, delighting in the architectural mashup Nathanael West derided in “The Day of the Locust” as “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas” and “Egyptian and Japanese temples.” Eric especially admired the Witch’s House in Beverly Hills, the Shakespeare Bridge in Franklin Hills and the stained glass windows in Carthay Circle. He learned not just about poses, pastrami and parapets, but about me. I was a woman fully engaged in life.

We also learned we were both determined to seize the day after seeing the rest of our spouses’ days seized from them. My guilt persisted. But this good man had found a route from the sofa to the city to my heart.

We finally met each other’s children. The days we seized became weeks, months and years. Our sons, though forever brokenhearted, thrived. Mine had children of their own, all with names that begin with “A” to honor their father. The oldest, at four, understands from photos that she has another grandpa, understands that the man in the picture is her daddy’s daddy. Her parents and I tell her about him: his kindness, grace, humor, wisdom. “I wish I could have known him,” she says.

“I do too,” I say, “more than anything.” When the others are old enough, we’ll tell them, too, about him. They’ll feel his essence because their fathers are just like him. He’ll stay, this way, in and around us.

Ever-gracious, Eric holds this space for him, as I try to do for his wife with their son. But becoming a grandmother only increased my guilt. My husband, consummate family man, was born to be a grandfather. Yet here I was, without him, flying high on the joy of grandparenting. What could I do besides love the children and grandchildren fiercely and be grateful for the privilege?

I could do this: recognize that if it takes a village to raise a child, the more villagers who love the child the better. My lucky grandchildren will feel their grandfather’s love by proxy and Eric’s love firsthand. They can even enjoy the love of Eric’s son, who patiently helps them build Lego worlds and cooks them their favorite soup.

Even as he holds space for my husband, Eric affectionately fills his own. He’s a tall man with a deep voice, an easy laugh and a warm embrace. He marvels at the latest evidence of the grandchildren’s genius, like any grandfather should, and spoils them with treats and toys. He’s so handy around their houses that my grandson greets him with, “What’re you gonna fix today?”

His most recent project involved the crib my husband and I had saved from our sons’ infancy with the hope that grandchildren would one day use it. Since the distance between slats was now deemed unsafe, Eric transformed the crib into blocks. “I wanted to honor the spirit of what you’d both wished for,” he said.

Then and now. Loss and gain. Selfless love.

For years now, Eric and I have both lived in my house. There are still naps, but more bustle. Our sons live close enough that we’re together a lot, and my house tends to be the happy hub. The grandchildren play near photos of their grandpa. Their “A” names ring out in this home where we raised their fathers. Meanwhile, Eric pulls them around on a rug he rigged as a magic carpet and helps stack the blocks into towers. When the grandchildren leave, he hugs them tight. My guilt remains, like pain in a phantom limb, but the sofa holds us all.

The author is a law school professor, researcher and author of an upcoming book on the scientifically proven neural superpowers of grandmothers. She lives on the Westside. She’s on Instagram @rondafoxwrites, and her website is rondafox.com.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

George Orwell famously wrote that it takes a constant struggle to see what’s in front of one’s nose. That may be truer than ever. These days we barely register things that 20 years ago would’ve seemed downright bizarre — like people staring down at their phones in busy crosswalks. The unnatural comes to seem natural.

Until it doesn’t. This has happened with the proliferation of data centers all over America. After years of ignoring their mushrooming growth — there are over 4,000 in the U.S. — the public now sees them clearly and doesn’t like what they represent, be it soaring energy bills or the advent of job-killing AI. People now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life — and in movies like Eddington — politicians are now pulled between their constituents’ desires and the devouring needs of Big Tech.

The hatred of data centers ignites the action in Cloudthief, a boisterous new novel that’s equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Rich, who may be best known for ecological non-fiction such as his 2019 book Losing Earth. Setting his story back in 2014 — when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls — Cloudthief centers on a brainy young man who, like the guy in the Leonard Cohen song, is just some Joseph looking for a manger.

Our narrator “Tim” — a pseudonym he says — is a freelance writer who’s gone broke doing magazine articles about climate change. He’s lonely and lost until he stumbles upon Virginia (also not her real name), who could be the American cousin of dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander.

Tech-savvy and paranoid and scarily elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini-storage unit and has plans for a blow against Big Tech. Evidently, Tim has never seen a noir movie because he doesn’t merely fall for this 21st-century fantasy of a femme fatale, he dreamily goes along with her plans to rob a data center in Pryor, Okla., and make off with the sellable information their servers contain.

Once they drive off to Pryor — Rich describes their road trip wonderfully — Cloudthief kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy stuff that we all love in a heist story. We see the baroque planning. We watch them case their target, a silver-smoke spewing behemoth that has the majestic size of two futuristic airport terminals but is actually as tacky as a boondocks mini-mall.

Nephi Craig, the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, credits eating, cooking and teaching about Indigenous food with saving his life.

Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months’ probation if he agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.

Craig says he initially felt like an “oddball” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with igniting his interest in cooking — and teaching him more about Native foods, including the tomato.

“[When] I came across this info that [the tomato] was native to the Americas, it just brought this really big smile to my face,” Craig says. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.”

Craig eventually landed a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he’d been working towards for years. But after a period of sobriety, a relapse ultimately cost him the job. He wound up in jail, where he worked in the kitchen and learned to design meals with whatever food was on hand.

“I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves ‘chiefs,’” he says. “Banding together to feed, I think it was 7,800 inmates a day, was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking.”

Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now sober, he works as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the White Mountain Apache tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center in Whiteriver, Ariz., which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that’s a place for the community to eat and talk. His new memoir is Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef.