Relational Field Theory

The Greatest Gift He Never Gave Me

There are people who pass through your life like weather — sudden, dramatic, unforgettable, and gone before you’ve had time to understand the shape of the storm.
And then there are the others.
The ones who move like geology.

Slow.
Steady.
Layered.
Permanent.

Charlie Love was geology.

He didn’t just teach anthropology or geology or Rapa Nui.
He was the field — as constant as the sun, as grounded as basalt, as mischievous as a trickster god who somehow ended up with tenure.

I was his work‑study, his student, his co‑conspirator in dirty jokes, and the person who sat outside his office waiting for him to grade tests at a pace that could only be described as “geologic time.” I loved those tests. I hated waiting for them. Both were true.

But the thing that stays with me — the thing that still hums in my field twelve years later — is the pineapple plant he promised me.

It sat in his living room, a little tropical anomaly in the middle of the Inland Northwest. He told me he’d give me a cutting. “You’ll keep it alive better than I will,” he said, which was a lie, but a flattering one. I believed him anyway.

He never gave it to me.

And somehow, that made it the greatest gift of all.

Anthropologists talk about hau — the spirit of the gift that binds giver and receiver. A gift isn’t just an object. It’s a relationship. A thread. A current. A promise that keeps moving between two people long after the exchange.

But what happens when the gift is never given?

It becomes unbreakable.

The pineapple plant became our unclosed circuit — the living thing that never changed hands, the promise that never resolved, the thread that never snapped. It stayed open. It stayed alive. It stayed ours.

And maybe that’s why I cried so hard when he died.

Not because I wanted the plant.
But because I wanted the continuity.
The line.
The field‑thread that ran between us.

Every Halloween, we’d take the kids trick‑or‑treating in his neighborhood. The porch lights would start going out, the candy bowls would empty, and my children — tiny, costumed, sugar‑buzzed creatures — would become his captive audience. He’d weave worlds for them. Rapa Nui, geology, field stories, jokes that made me snort and made them giggle even though they didn’t understand half of it.

Forty‑five minutes on a darkening sidewalk, listening to Charlie spin the universe into something warm and funny and alive.

That was the real gift.

The pineapple plant was just the artifact.

And because he never handed it to me — because the exchange never closed — the hau of that gift is still here. Still humming. Still binding. Still alive in the field of my life.

The greatest gift he never gave me is the one that never ended.