Several of the neighborhood people were gathering around us. We must have seemed like aliens to them. A little girl went up to Sue, who explained that I had once lived in this house.
“He did?” she said, her voice rising, not believing that this man had lived in her home.
“Do you want to meet him?” Sue asked.
The little girl came over to me. She couldn’t have been any older than ten. I put my hand out for her to shake. I told her my name and she told me hers. Her hand, though tiny, was not a young child’s hand. It was dry and remarkably coarse.
The following day we decided to go back to Crystal Beach, a place that was as close to paradise as I could imagine when I was a little boy. Much of what I recalled had changed or been shut down. The amusement park, for example, which we’d never been able to afford, had closed years ago. The property was covered with condos.
Still, I felt like I was no longer in the present but back in the forties. I had a very clear image of a dance hall that had stood on the rise of the beach, off to the side, where only adults were allowed to go. It was a mysterious place, wonderful. At night, my mother and father would go there, and although I was too young to really consider romance, I did think of my parents dancing. Maybe they would kiss, maybe not—I didn’t know, but we’d look over at the hall, always in the dark, the doorway and the windows glowing gold in the night.
The reinvention of the place in my head was different, of course, than what had actually happened. At times, in my memory, I was set apart from my family. I was standing on the wide cement pier, the water turbulent, sloshing against the pilings. My mother and Joel were walking past me, and then they would stop and look at me. They appeared, in my memory, like any regular mother and son. Only I wasn’t with them. And when they stopped to look at me, this little boy, standing by the pier, they wouldn’t necessarily say anything. It was as if they were sort of asking me if I wanted to join them.
I think some of the nostalgia of being there rubbed off on Sue, who said she wanted to visit the old cottage that her parents had rented in the summers. It didn’t really matter to us that much of the beach was now a gated community, that things were not precisely as we remembered them.
Near the end of the trip, we visited the cemetery where my family is buried. The weather had darkened a bit. We found the spot, and I rested my hand on my mother’s gravestone. It was weathered, but there was still a grit to it, a toughness, something enduring about it, which I felt was appropriate. The grass was soft, and so was the air. I thought about what these people, who had had hard lives, would think about me and the kind of life I had led. Their judgment was massively important to me. I felt that they would have been proud of me. But I sensed no response. But (of course!) the response would have to come from inside myself. I lingered a little while, and then we left.
Ultimately, on that weekend of memory and retrospection, there were a few accompanying feelings of sadness. But there were also rich images of the times Sue and I spent together. I thought about Sue, sixteen years old, coming up out of the water, me watching her from the sand. I thought about how curvy she was, and beautiful, her hair wet as she tucked it behind her neck. She was young and lacking self-consciousness. This beautiful girl was mine and I was hers, and there was the possibility that she would remain so. That is something to which I still cling, an innocent amazement that she is mine.
One last memory: of standing alone on a dock on the shore of Lake Erie decades ago, near my boyhood home. I throw a stone into the water, and as I watch the ripples extending outward from the point of impact, I become aware of an older me standing nearby, watching. Not just that, but my mother and brother, too. A 3-D memory, as it were—a little bend in the time-space continuum.
I should be too old to engage in such fantasy. Yet I shamelessly admit that I do—all the time. Fantasy will save you if you let it. You are always encouraged to be a proper grown-up, but if you succumb to that pressure (I never did, occasional appearances aside), you will miss something important, the magic of daily living. You will miss the magnificent, gargantuan essence—the beauty and the joy—that can be uncovered within all the things we encounter on any day. A day when one steps out into fresh air after a week in the hospital; a day one might be walking with his wife on vacation, dancing at a party amongst friends and relatives—some alive, some from the past; or a day at the edge of a dock, idly throwing a stone, waiting for something extraordinary to happen.
20
No Man Is an Island
When I was growing up in Buffalo, someone told me that “the longest way around is the shortest way home.” That bit of folk wisdom has turned out to reflect
