The beginning of what?
The world has changed.
The way we see each other has changed.
Will we begin now to go back to the way we were?
How was that? Do we remember, or do we imagine?
We are children leaving home.
Restless to be free, unfettered by old bonds.
When our ecstasy subsides and the lightness leaves our step, will we rest and take stock of how far we have come?
Or will we stubbornly trudge on,
looking for something that,
even as we search,
we begin to understand we will never find?
There’s a bench overlooking the beach in Carmel where I stop to sit sometimes and think about nothing. I suppose I never really think about nothing, just not anything in particular. Looking out over the ocean, I let my mind wander, and like the waves my thoughts ebb and flow and now and then wash up something that has been misplaced, a memory.
Underneath the bench is a mailbox. I ignored it the first few times I sat there. Well, that’s not exactly true. I thought it was private, like a real mailbox, and I shouldn’t look. Or maybe it was full of snakes, or drug needles, or condoms. Yesterday, I peeked inside. There was a bag of colored pencils and a half dozen journals. It was a memory box. I closed it without disturbing anything. I did let myself imagine what might be written there, and by whom. Love notes between young Romeos and Juliettes. Or private thoughts of those who had no one to tell them to, for whom a mailbox under a bench near a cypress tree was a confessional.
A plaque on the bench says it was dedicated in May, 1992, the month and year my son Nicholas was born. I think of that time as a kind of re-beginning of our family’s life. We moved to a farm in Maryland, where Nick learned to call cows in to feed, his brother Chris grew pumpkins as big as he was, and Meg wrote her first novel. We only lived on that farm for three years, but it held onto our hearts for a long time. When that first novel was published years later, we went back there to celebrate it with our friends at the hunt club who had holes in their sweaters and drove old blue tractors to plow us out in snow storms.
That was also about the time I really got to know Meg’s parents, Don and Anna Waite. We started going to Colorado with them every Christmas. I was a sketchy son-in-law, a divorced man marrying their metaphorically virginal daughter. But in those mountains, they took me in and made me feel part of their family. Anna made us needle point stockings, and Don got up to take Chris and Nick on the early shuttle to the ski slopes, his pockets stuffed with frozen Snickers bars, like treats for puppies.
The thoughts that lapped at me yesterday on that seaside bench were of dinners and brunches with them, of Waite family reunions, of trips and ball games, of Don walking down his driveway and into the street to signal that it was safe to back out after a visit, that no car was speeding around the curve. Their love and generosity are gently soothing tides, coming in and out steadily, dependably, no matter the time or season.
For me, immortality is in the memories of our loved ones. In recollections of laughter and joy, even pain, that are as beautiful as the pearly gates. As worn-smooth and durable as the lives that hold them. Benches by the sea, mailboxes stuffed with journals and colored pencils.
