“just come on home
come on home
no you don’t have to
be alone...”
Walked around the old cemetery and then the new one, too, the new one, the one where my first wife and my only father lie close together in their final resting places, and I walk and look down at the Upper Hudson valley, swathed in the infinite shades of gray my little heart, and there’s a plot between the two of them reserved for me, between where where we will lay my mother and my first love lies now.
A quiet Saturday afternoon in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a time that whoever survives to write the history of will write about for generations to come.
My father wrote and talked about history for a living; he wrote about it, and talked about it, and taught it, to and for a couple of generations.
The sun darted in and out of the clouds, lit them up in shades that changed by the second.
Unfortunately I did not inherit the sort of memory power he had, to recall obscure facts from the subconscious to the lips the way he did. Ask him who zoomed who behind the lines before the first Battle of Saratoga, lines I can see off in the distance as I look out at this achingly gorgeous valley on this achingly quiet, gorgeous Saturday afternoon and, on a dime, he could tell you what they said Gates said to Arnold, and Arnold to Gates, and he could give you an expert opinion as to which of them could best lay claim to the truth.
That Saturday was his seventy-seventh birthday.
&&&
I did inherit the ability, if you can or want to call it that, to remember obscure details of days long gone, and I remembered a long-ago birthday of his, 1995, a quarter century ago, myself just married and my bride just arrived here the day before after nine months apart.
I start another lap around the old cemetery, the grays in the sky changing faster than I can track.
We had stopped by the house on our way out to a second honeymoon in some deserted town in southern Maine, to pick up a few things she had shipped over from the old country.
My Dad stepped out the front door with a big smile on his face.
He didn’t smile easily.
He used to joke that the only emotion he easily expressed was anger, but that smile, that day, his happiness for me, his son, it took me a long time to realize how much he loved me, whatever our differences, but I realized it that day, in that smile.
I walk along, looking at old gravestones, some carrying stories that died with him a year ago February 4th, and remember that smile, that late morning, standing in the April sun, and him hugging us goodbye out in front of our house. It seemed like the next summer, around the corner then, in that springtime warmth, in that goodbye hug, would last forever.
But summer always ends.
&&&
And when winter came blowing with gale-force velocity into my life, he stood alongside me. Held me up when it looked like I might just roll away in the wind like a featherweight, dried out oak leaf.
&&&
Eventually the winter passed, though it seemed to take forever, seemed to take far longer than it did.
And though I may not possess the memory he did, I still remember him saying, one desperate night after I had barely managed to get the kids into bed, I still remember him saying,
“You’re doing way better than I would have. I’m proud of you. You’re doing way better than I would have.”
&&&
Spring came again, April came again.
My Dad’s not been gone all that long. but this song reminds me of him, and of my mother.
And it makes me think of Sheila, the second great love of my life.
”the swimming suits
are on the line
just dryin’ …”
We’re all the way into it, two jobs, four kids.
Trying to keep those jobs, and trying to do what we can for those four kids.
We don’t give them as much as we want, and as I walk through those cemeteries, I wonder what my Dad, a teacher, would say to us in these times.
Forgive yourself, he might say.
Do your best, he might say.
&&&
”just like that old house we thought was haunted
summer’s end came faster than we wanted...”
I walk on, decide on one more lap, one more
lap through old memories,
one more lap through what I’ve lost, and
one more lap through the gratitude of what I have now,
one more lap at just being glad,
in the midst of all this goddamn madness, to be alive and in love,
gifts I don’t deserve and gifts I don’t take for granted, because my Dad taught me better than that.