“Well, it’s a helluva day—it sure is. The water is breaking yellow and blue and white. I notice that as the sun presses down on the dark blue water, for a moment it is as if the color from the sun, the color caught on the water, remains suspended, like ink or paint being spilled from a brush, and then the droplets separate and are dispersed. In much the same way, the color in the little crests of waves that rise up and break, which is white, seems to remain poised in slow motion, appearing as tiny bursts of light spreading briefly in the air, like starbursts. Light is so precious…”
(Pause for breath.)
At that, toward the end of this sunny day, the light begins to dim, almost imperceptibly at first. The guests sense it. So it is with every party like this: with the falling light, an ending, or rather endings, seem imminent. The party starts to wind down, and the water and the shore and the dozens of family members and ancient friends are beginning slowly to disperse like the spray from the water lapping the concrete pier and the sides of the boat. What remains undiminished, oddly, are the images of the young faces and unformed personalities of the babies—our children and their children, and one can even begin to see the faces, albeit vague at this point, of their children, and their children, and on and on, the smooth faces and little bodies of all babies. The youngsters are beginning to file out from the ballroom into the spring air out on the deck of the craft, which means that it is time for the rest of us to leave and go our separate ways.
“I could not have expected all of you to stay here at my party forever,” I conclude, “but we do remain, we know, in whatever etchings we have made in the character of those still living and yet to live, and on the earth that is home to all of us. So it is with great pride and comfort that we leave the children, clear-eyed and strong as we ever were and even more so, to raise anchor and move off into the waters on their own.”
Here I pause. I am choked up and cannot speak. How proud I am to see my children and their children leaving for…for what, I do not know. I can only have hopes for them, and for all children. Will my grandmother’s standards, which have so enriched my life, survive and bear fruit beyond me? Let it be so. In so many ways, do we not create the future we desire by honoring the past?
But then there is the cruel irony, the darker side of those admonitions and expectations: everything we old-timers at the party have achieved or hoped for seems about to be wrenched from us and vested in our young ones. That makes me feel a deeper sadness than I have ever before experienced, despite its being tempered by my pride in the children’s Possibles. Yes, there is my hope for them wherever they venture, but a hope tinged with a terrible concern. Oh, how I do want to go with them, to guide them, but also to participate with them along the surely immense journey. Yet I know I must be content with having left them with some shards of what passes for wisdom and guidance. Still, it is such a saddening realization. Loss has been a hallmark of my life. Will I now be losing my children? A foolish thought…something of me, of my soul, of my wife’s goodness and sense, and of my mother’s and grandmother’s strength and righteousness, will always be with them. That is not a loss for me, is it? No, I think you will agree that it is surely a gift.
The crowd is waiting for me to continue, but the children are showing some impatience, waiting to get the boat launch underway and move on to their own games and adventures. There’s Sue, with Arthur’s wife, Kim, and their sons, James and Beau, holding each other’s hands. From somewhere I summon up a modicum of focus and clear my throat.
“Therefore, a toast, if you will: to those who continue…”
As I look out over the crowd, perhaps it is from exhaustion that I feel my heart fill almost to bursting. It is a moment of immeasurable, inexpressible wonder and joy. I am no longer myself. I feel as if my skin has opened and I am nowhere and everywhere, and everyone and everywhere and everything are part of me. Suddenly there are tears running down my cheeks. Why? Why the tears? Why the joy? I do not understand. All that comes to mind is the blessing that is life. Some may call it a mixed blessing, but for me—and you may well think of me as blind to reality—it is simply an uncountable succession of blessings. But how can there be such a thing as only blessings?
You know that my luck has come on an oscillating curve: bad, good, bad, good—on the verge of beginning the life I wanted, losing my eyesight and then becoming, as in my exuberant exaggeration, the luckiest man in the world. Yet this joy that I feel now is unadulterated by pain and suffering. I have no sense of a calculation of the bad measured against the good. I consider: That I have chosen life and embraced it. That I have a golden place in life, with family and friends.
And I see something else, a scene that is so mystical, so beautiful—but so implausible, really, even at a no-holds-barred party like this one—that I unthinkingly rub my eyes (which I am not supposed to do). I see my own soul joined with Arthur’s soul, just as it was written in
