Category: Mortality

When Life is Enough

Noah Larsson lay in bed. An empty water glass on the bedside table. His reading glasses resting on his copy of McCoullough’s The American Spirit. The curtains are drawn closed but still the white afternoon light and heat penetrate the room.  

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties each night.

When he awoke earlier, he’d turned on his side to get up. He needed to go to the bathroom and down to the kitchen for something to eat. He could not. He had not even the strength to move his legs over the edge or shift the weight off his bad shoulder.

The bed was the one in which his father had been born; in the house his great-great grandfather had built, in the town in which he’d cut stone from the steep, deep sides of the granite quarries.

Larsson had been a Navy man, joining right out of high school, flying crew in east coast patrol bombers.

After he was discharged, he met Margret. Two months later, they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottninghol. They took a bus to Stockholm to meet her parents. They stayed a week, returning to Boston, to take whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter, Ulla.

He started an accounting business he’d kept for fifty years, moonlighting selling insurance for a company in Hartford. He never took out a policy of his own. With his clients, he never spoke about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was the right thing to do.

Margret died young. There was not a day he did not mourn for her. He raised Ulla until she married and left home. For fifty years he kept the old house. And when Ulla, too, died young, he mourned doubly each day.

He paid his bills on time, read books by Goodwin, Tuchman, and Mantel, remembering each one as they sat in rows on his bookshelves. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm in good running order.

He saved every nickel, owed not a penny, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Mailed fruit boxes from Florida each Christmas to close family. Late in life he found companionship with a woman close to his age whose quiet good humor and cooking he enjoyed. 

He never spoke ill of another soul. He kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit a light only when he needed one, shutting it off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and warmed  Swanson’s dinners in the microwave. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will and never would.

Trust one’s own counsel, keep one’s affairs in order, plan well and prepare for adversity, ask for no favors, offer kindness and accept kindness with grace . That’s all one need do.

He’d handwritten his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law. He had files and note cards for everything, catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a single newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, a cup of hot coffee in front of him, and a smile on his face. He found comfort in solitude as well as community.

Later in the blistering August afternoon, Noah’s son-in-law and his new wife came to check on him and found him in bed with the door and windows closed and the air conditioner off.

“Oh my God, Noah,” he said. “It’s like an oven in here. It must be a hundred.”

“Noah? Can you get up?” said the woman, “Open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Don’t you turn it on!” Noah said. “It’s old and it won’t last if you run it too hard.”

“Noah it’s so damn hot in here, you won’t last as long as the A/C if you don’t let us turn it on.”

They managed him out of the bed, to the bathroom and down on the stair-chair to the kitchen. He drank a glass of orange juice, ate an egg,  toast, and a cup of coffee. He thanked them and asked them to help him move to the couch in the living room where he could rest, which they did and where he fell quickly asleep.

When they returned and tried towaken him the next morning, they called the police. The ambulance came. From the couch, in a weakened, near inaudible voice, he said, raising his head, “I know my rights. I have authorized no healthcare proxy and no power of attorney. I speak for myself. You can’t make me leave my own house! I refuse any treatment, to be placed on a gurney, or to be taken to the hospital or anywhere else. I need rest. Leave me and do not come back under any circumstances.”

They did as he asked.

He lay his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes. The afternoon was waning.

When he was younger, he had smoked a pipe, as had his father. His grandfather’s meerschaum. He imagined himself now filling the bowl with fresh tobacco from a leather pouch, tamping down the soft, thin aromatic ribbons with his finger and putting a match to them, drawing in the warm soothing sweet savory smoke into his mouth and deep into his soul.

His bones and muscles relaxed to nothingness. Gone was the sensation of lying on the couch. Intermittent light and shade through the window drift over him as at the beach when thin cirrus clouds pass slowly across the sky. Moments of cooling shade alternating with warming rays of sun. His mind finds rest, carelessly floating on a calming sea before slipping beneath it into a long dreamless sleep.

Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach in the morning he resisted believing it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing until they had wordlessly drifted apart without, he thought, having made any sort of commitment, save for the unspoken assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together when she was in town, mostly on the weekends, at one of the beach bars along the A1A strip up by Fort Pierce for drinks, slow dances, and sharing their stories over a bowl of peel n’ eat shrimp or maybe the conch fritters which she liked better even though they were greasy and she’d have to take a Zantac later but truly because the lingering smell of shrimp on her fingers kept her from teasing herself with the smell of Sedge on them after he would leave with the sky beginning to lighten over the water in the east through the windows of the condo she rented in the winter months, but before the beachgoers had set up their chairs and umbrellas, save for the brown-skinned men in Panama hats, long sleeve shirts, and their tall fishing rods to catch the blues or whatever was running from the tuna that early in the day and, when Sedge, that day, saw the body, a shudder ran down his spine to behind his knees from the adrenaline or whatever chemical it is that shocks into your veins and your heart and lungs and stomach even before your eyes have adjusted to what you are seeing, like how your brain knows what is coming before the tires screech and the metal crushes you into the exploding airbags and breaks your nose, and he realized then that it was her, with the leathery men and women around her with their tucked-in towels and their heads bent, and she, lying on her stomach with her arms spread out limp and wide and her head turned away from him as if she could not bear to think of him looking at her lying flat on the beach in the black bathing suit she loved and thought she looked stunning in and how he might think then that she’d worn the same bathing suit two days in a row instead of how she washed it each evening and hung it to dry on the railing of the deck of the condo, soaking up the morning sun and the freshness of the sea and, with her hair red and clogged with clumps of brown seaweed, and the drying sand adhering to her back and her thighs in a way that she would feel made her look dissolute and un-ladylike, and as if she wanted him turn and walk back up the beach while the other men and women standing over like mournful Neolithic sarsen Stonehenge pillars created long slow shadows across her body, with one of them pointing toward her as if questioning whether or not to cover her before the police came, and talking in soft funereal tones to spare her from hearing what perhaps only she, if she were alive, would hear, as she always had, as criticism and fault with her, as had her father in the years before he left her mother and herself in the one bedroom apartment in Kissimmee where she had slept on the pullout couch and, even then, at the age of seven, was expected to have washed and dressed herself and made her own breakfast and folded the bed back up into the rank and moldy innards of the couch that had been in the apartment they rented by the month, and hearing, on the first day of every month, the rapping on the door as she picked up the trash and bottles from the kitchen floor and put them in the bin as she had been told to do whenever the landlord came for the rent, peeking in over her shoulder, breathing his rancid breath with his hand on the small of her back in a way that chilled her and made gooseflesh on her arms and she would tell him that he should come back in the evening to see her father who had the money for him, while her father, at that very moment, was laying in his shorts and tee shirt with his arm across her mother, before she dressed and left for work at the nail salon in Orlando six days a week, knowing that the life she had was not the life she wanted nor wanted for her daughter and prayed that when Adelaide was old enough she would leave this tawdry place and its guns and ammo shops and have a life that would bring her a little happiness, a little rest, and a man who would treat her right, like a woman wants to be treated, and which, she told Adelaide, that that life would come to her because she was smart and strong and wily, to which Adelaide would laugh and say that she never wanted to be like Wile E Coyote because he’s the one who always runs off the edge of the cliff or has an anvil falling down on him and maybe he dies or maybe he doesn’t but she didn’t really know because she’d always put her hands over her eyes when she saw that starting to happen and she hoped that it never ever would happen to her, and her mother would grab her up in her soft white arms and hold her as tight as could be and squeeze Adelaide’s breath out of her and say to her, “Adelaide, my baby, that will never happen to you,” and, when Sedge saw her lying there in her black bathing suit in the center of the growing crowd on the early beach with the receding tide, his heart sank and his knees sank, falling to the rough sand, he shielded his eyes in his arms, wanting in desperate hopeful hopelessness for what he had seen to be unseen, undone, and erased from the eternal memory of the universe and feeling, too, that somehow, someway, he had what?…. failed her?…. forsaken?…. her by not caring enough to avert whatever had happened to her, while knowing in the deepest depths of his being that, yes, that was, in truth, what he had done.

Silas Cleary, Friday Morning 

Silas Cleary awakes slowly. Friday morning. It is grey with wind and rain.

He draws the covers aside and lifts one leg, and then the other, over the side of the bed. He feels the cold floor on the soles of his feet as he walks into the kitchen. His sleep had been fitful, interrupted, and difficult falling back to sleep.

He takes his morning meds from the cupboard and swallows them with a cup of warm coffee from the pot Mirette had made for the two of them before she left for work.

The day is his. Nothing required of him. Only what he wants to do. And what needs doing.

Rain thrums against the roof shingles. After coffee, Silas sits at his desk to write a few emails. He is wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Dion in concertat the Tropicana in Atlantic City in 2004.

A brief intro followed by two, three, and four beats of silence. The next thing you hear is an acapella solo, by a bass-baritone, his lips and breath pushing out heavy, propulsive consonants into the mic: Dun-dun-dun-dun, Dun-dun-dun-dun-dah, and in comes Dion riding above the bass, with his B-flat tenor, asking, I wonder why, I love you like I do. is it because I think you love me to?

The do-wop, the rhythm, the lyrics of teen angst, wonder, and the anticipation of first love.  All as real and present for him as in ’58 when he first heard it on the radio in the back seat of his brother’s black 1951 Ford Custom Tudor sedan … Dun-dun-dun- dun- dah...

Last night, as he has done on every-other Thursday night for the last sixteen weeks, Silas went to sleep wearing an infusion pump as he will for two nights and three days. Chemotherapy agents flowing through a port in his chest. The pump emits a low whir and click. In the days after the infusion begins, the fatigue, the neuropathy, the GI symptoms, and low appetite come again.

Silas has cancer. It is treatable the oncologist says. Treatable, but not curable. It was diagnosed five months ago.

An endoscopy had revealed a bleeding gastric ulcer which would be biopsied.

Two days after the endoscopy, the hospitalist came into his room, pulling aside the curtains between the beds. “You have cancer,” he said. He’d been brief, disconnected, barely making eye contact. If he’d said more, Silas could remember none of it. And then when he was done, Silas was left alone, sitting in bed.

It, the diagnosis, was unexpected. A surprise. Coming at him like a sand-spreader truck backing out of a blind alley onto a dark, icy road towards his car at three o’clock in the morning.

And as it is backing out, for an instant, time slows to a slouching crawl; the mind moving at one-quarter speed in the single second before the crash.

In a way, though, it was less of a surprise: the slow motion truck coming toward him was real. For years he’d had heartburn, anemia, fatigue, cramps, taking Tums, and pantoprazole. It all kept getting worse.

And then he’d gone to the ER.

Alone in the hospital bed, surrounded by sadness, he felt the tickle tears that would have come if only someone else had been there by the bedside. But no one was, and the tears did not come.

It didn’t matter that the doctor didn’t stay. The diagnosis had become the new incumbent shape of reality. The frame, the context, the backdrop.

But within that, nothing had changed. The room. The light through the window. The metal chair in the corner. The closet with his coat, shoes and a bag of his belongings. The white board with his last and first name, date, and who the on-duty nurse was. The book he brought, the phone, and a plastic cup of water on the wheeled table. Everything was the same, exactly the same, as moments before, but everything was different.

Later, Silas will feed the dog and then they’ll walk up into the woods behind the horse farm, avoiding the puddles and mud, and  taking the path that circles the lake and leads up through the cemetery. 

When they come back, he’ll make something for breakfast, pay the bills coming due, and write for a few hours. Maybe a nap before starting dinner.  Tomorrow he’ll return to packing up books for the thrift store and the used bookstore, considering which ones to be left on the shelves.

Yesterday had been the last infusion in the first treatment cycle. Eight, three-day infusions, two weeks apart. Sixteen weeks of first line therapy. Whatever line might come next will depend on the results of the PET scan he’ll have in four days.

Don’t know why I love you. I just do.

Silas no longer wonders why. There is no point to wondering why.

Not why his life has taken the turn it has. Nor why he loves Mirette or their dog or cooking, or mowing the lawn, or reading books about slavery and the Third Reich, or why he spends his time writing short stories. This is what he does now, what he wants to do, what he will continue to do.

By next week, the fatigue will have worn itself out, and the mouth sores and tingling fingers will lessen. He will call a friend, and they’ll meet for coffee and talk about the novels they’re reading, Wimbledon, and the state of the world. And they’ll make plans to play tennis one morning, and to go to the little seafood place on Hanover Street in the North End and they’ll order a skillet of the black ink pasta and garlic calamari meatballs with a house salad with oil and vinegar, and maybe also a bottle of Nero d’Avola… if the spirit so moves them.

 And come fall, he and Mirette will rake and bag up the oak and maple leaves, and they’ll plant the bulbs they’ve kept in the basement. Maybe they’ll plan a vacation to someplace simple and warm, and with a language they will not have to practice and learn to speak beforehand.

My Dinner with Andra

Andra and I met for dinner at Wo Hop on Mott Street. It serves what she calls the most “authentic New York-style” Chinese food. It is bright, loud and crowded. It smells heavenly. And the waiters rush dishes out as soon as they are prepared.

Because her flight from Europe was delayed, we met there at 9:30 pm, shortly before closing.

We sat at a booth in a corner furthest from the kitchen. She’d slept on the plane intermittently and she was ravenous. She ordered for the two of us.

 We spoke for a while about Budapest, her writing, and the course she taught there. She was animated but soon her mood shifted.

She folded her arms in front of her on the table and leaned toward me.

“I am spent,” she said. “I had such great hopes for my year away and much of it was wonderful. But I now feel lost, unmoored, and meaningless to a certain extent and that life, in fact, lacks any inherent meaning.”

“Andra,” I said.

“No, I’m serious. I was there for a year and my classes were going well. I even considered moving there, at least for a few years, but as time went on, I felt the work was dispiriting. I was diligent. I admit, I had high expectations. However, my students were unengaged, uncommitted, at least in the way I had expected them to be: European, whatever that might mean. They were no better by comparison to those I had been teaching here. I began to ask myself, am I making any difference at all in their lives? They certainly were not making any difference in mine.”

“Andra, I know you. You’re a good teacher. Your students speak highly of you.”

“Yes, yes, I know that, but…”

“And this just began in Budapest?

“No. In fact, I had taken the job there because I felt that living here, in this New York bubble, was, with the constant hype, celebrity, needy causes, acquisitiveness, and self-satisfaction, stifling. Don’t you feel that at times?”

“About New York or that I am going through life playing a part of some sort with no meaning?”

“Well, both, but more than that, that life ultimately has no meaning. We fill our days with work and phone calls and dinners out, and futile political conversations without any effect. When, in fact, they are simply diversions from facing that we are alone in the world which cares nothing about us and which itself has no meaning.”

The waiter had brought platters of chow fun, spareribs with ginger and scallion and a shrimp dish I could not identify. I spooned some of each dish onto my plate.

“Andra, I don’t disagree with you at all. The world is, in fact, pointless. But life need not be meaningless or pointless. If you are thinking that because, ultimately, as perhaps you are, we all die, therefore life has no meaning, I disagree with you. If anything, death gives us the opportunity to find meaning in life, in relationships, family, and creativity.”

She was quiet while the waiter filled our glasses with ice water.

“On the flight back,” she said, “I had this terrifyingly real dream that I had somehow contracted a painful and incurable condition, much like when I was younger and had endometriosis which they could do nothing for except remove my uterus which I refused to do, and now I had this disease, equally painful and incurable. I woke up in fear. I may have screamed, because the attendant came over to me and she actually sat down next to me and asked if they should divert the fight for me, and of course I said no, I apologized and passed it off as nothing of concern.”

“That must have been so frightening.”

“Yes, yes, it was, but of course I don’t have such a disease. Not that I know of, but what if I do? It would be all over. How could I go on? Maybe I could. I mean it just shows you how flimsy life can be. Ultimately how meaningless it is. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes, I said, “I am constantly aware of the tenuousness of life and, and, how close to death we might be at any moment. Even at this very moment.”

“Doesn’t that terrify you?” she said, “I try not to think about that. I don’t think I could get up in the morning or go to work if I thought like that. But you have not touched the kung pao shrimp, it is truly scrumptious.” 

I took a bite of the shrimp.

“And then,” she continued, “just when I was considering lengthening my stay there, to focus on the book I had started, there was this student, an attractive young man from the Pest quarter of the city, who was clearly one of the better of the group, invited me to lunch after the semester ended. We went to the Espresso café near the Montenegro Embassy. He was an earnest young man and quite well dressed. I admit I felt a twinge of what, affection, perhaps. But as the afternoon went on, I was unprepared for what he began talking about.”

“What was that?”

“Well, at one point over our coffee, he said, conversationally, that he was studying acting and that Stanislavski taught that the essence of acting was to constantly ask oneself, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?’ And he told me, again quite earnestly, that to truly live we must ask those questions of ourselves. Only then, he said, can we act with honesty, compassion. and empathy. Only then can we live rather than just perform.”

“That is remarkable insight is it not? I mean, for a young man. And, was that not what you yourself had been feeling? Did you see him again?”

“Heavens no,” she said. “Why would he say such things to me? His former teacher. I had no desire to spend the rest of the afternoon at a glorious outdoor café by the Danube or any time or any place, being lectured by him about how I should live.”

“But, Andra, was he not being sincere and caring and relating to you, just as you wanted. Just as we all want?”

She looked at me as if I was talking gibberish.

“I don’t know what we all want, and don’t think you or he know either. I toldhim that what he was suggesting to me was, by implication, impertinent and glaringly inappropriate. I am an educated, aware, and accomplished person. Thoroughly cognizant of my own mortality, and that, as a path to gain authenticity in life that I should engage in some theatrical trick is in any way superior to, say, just waking up each day, having a cup of coffee, breathing in some fresh air and saying, ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens today.”

Her watch beeped. She checked and moved to stand up.

“I am tired now. I am exhausted, and I am going home to sleep. I have come home from a situation which no longer worked for me. And tomorrow I will undoubtedly awaken, say ‘fuck it,’ perhaps out loud, and feel boundlessly better.”

I started to say something when she stood up. She waved me not to, thanked the waiter, gathered up her package of leftovers, and said, “This has been fabulous,” and, pointing to the check, she said to me ,“I have only a few Euros in my pocket. Please be a dear, will you?”

And then she was gone. Her footsteps clacked on the concrete steps up to Mott Street.

The Shape We’re In

I tell you this story from the vantage point of having lived through several presidential administrations which I thought at the time were the worst that ever could be, only to be judged wrong by a new one which was exponentially more terrible. The current administration may be the absolute bottom of that rancid barrel, and possibly so bad that it could conceivably be the last one we see. Though of course, I might be wrong.

A week before Christmas 1988, in the darkest hours of the year, I made gingerbread cookies.

I rolled flat the ball of cold dough I had made on the floured cutting board. I was listening to The Band. Levon Helm.

The Weight. The Shape I’m In. His voice was a muddy truck on a rough upstate road. His dirt farmer voice pushing through the roadside brambles. Singing how he felt. How I felt. How we all felt. The shape we were in.

It had snowed three inches that week, and by that time forty thousand eight hundred forty-nine men women and children in the country had died of HIV/AIDS in the six years since we’d recognized that an epidemic had begun.

I set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and peeled each figure apart and laying them flat and brown on the baking sheets. Dozens of them. Arms and legs outstretched.

With the edge of a spoon, I drew eyes and a smile into each face. A Greek chorus, now, of eager Athenians bearing citizen witness to the events to come.

The number of deaths, their constancy, the relentless procession of them, had become the landscape. The gestalt. The number itself was benumbing. A monochrome veil over your vision while you could still clearly see and feel the enormity of each passing; each life’s loss.

The constant cloud of death hung about us; about all of those I worked with. The dread of it stitched onto the edges of everything, even in the campy, offhand-sounding humor. We cared for the sick and scared, studied the data and the pathology, the science and medicine and the hopeful rumors of unlikely cures.

Reagan had long since shown himself to be the devil. He surely knew better. His friends were dying around him. Nevertheless, he acted as if he was simply callously clueless, when he was, demonstrably heartlessly uncaring and cruel.

Regan’s willful ignorance and inaction were incomprehensible. To what end, six years in, would he not lead the mobilization of medical care, research and compassion?

The gingerbread cookies would be my Christmas gift this year for our work group. We all made cookies to share. Tiny pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse. We had no holiday party. There was no holiday. We’d exchange the boxes and bags and jars before leaving work on Christmas eve and be back the next day.

I took a step away from the counter and looked at the figures. Each one of them. Arms and legs outstretched. Their smiling faces.

A smile came to my own face, and grew slowly, and I began to laugh. It became a big, head-tipped-back, body laugh, reaching out to the corners of the kitchen .

It upwelled from deep within me. I was work- and world-weary and sleep-deprived and the laugh did me good.

Rolling out another ball of dough, I cut the next batch of figures and found myself pressing a downward frown into each of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made me laugh, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me.

Tears filled my eyes, overflowing my cheeks and I cried as I could never remember doing. He cried for myself, and everyone and everything. For all of us. Our frustration and fear. Our sadness, our rebellion, and anger and our helplessness.

A skin-prickling sadness, not only for myself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and all the Johns and James and Emilys, and every other one of the friends we had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces I’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia or a other diseases that ravaged them. And those for whom AZT promised a cure but only made the dying harder.

Friends I knew and did not know, younger than me, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed. All of them who had not had the care they needed, the research they demanded, the recognition as humans in need which they deserved, because the president of the country they lived in could not abide helping them or funding the research that might save them, and could not, even as men and women he knew, died all around him, Reagan could not even speak the name of the disease they had.

When all the cookies were done, the smiling and the frowning, I bundled them, warm, together and wrapped them in white tissue paper and tied green and red ribbons around their waists. The house was quiet. I was exhausted. I was drained, and I most needed to sleep.

That was over forty years ago. We lived every day with the consequences of the government’s lack of action and human compassion, and its willingness, born out of ignorance, to discriminate and marginalize people based upon its own politics. It resulted in an early and painful death by an infectious disease for many thousands in the U.S. and millions worldwide.

Our experience with the COVID pandemic was taken from the same disastrous playbook. Politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, and willful ignorance of public health practices resulted again in the death of  tens of hundreds of thousands of men women and children.

Now, once more, politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, willful ignorance, lack of human compassion, and a blatant disregard and disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, is unfolding daily in full view. We can not yet know how many lives have been, and will be, sent into turmoil, hardship, disappearance, torture, illness, and possible death by a government sworn to follow the constitution and other laws, acting rightfully and impartially for the sake of the citizens and the society.

Angie Vito Concetta

After dinner, Vito clears the table and places the dishes in the sink, plugging the drain and running warm water over them with a few drops of detergent. The water soothes his hands as he looks out into the back yard. Though they eat early in winter, the sky is full dark now. The tree trunks are lit only by the light from the window.

When he finishes the dishes, he dries his hands, puts on his reading glasses and sits at the table with the newspaper open in front of him.

Angie is on the phone in their bedroom.

He looks up from the paper. The cabinets, the appliances on the counters. The radio. He feels distant, distracted, touching his palm to his chest where the ache has been. If anyone were to ask, he’d say he doesn’t dwell on things. Angie does, he knows, but that is something he would not tell another soul.

Despite the short winter daylight hours, the days feel long now. Longer than they had been when was working. When he’d been up at four and at the Hunt’s Point market by five and then to their store on Tenth Avenue by 6:00 and opening the doors by 6:30, folding the boxes and stacking the crates, while the women with their mesh bags start to come in, looking over and touching the fruits and vegetables. All fresh this morning he’d tell them.

None of that fills his days anymore. After he sold the business to the Koreans, neither his mind nor his body have adjusted to the change. He still wakes at same time. Doses off soon after dinner. His body aches in ways now it never seemed to before. His mind wanders with nowhere to go.

You should read a book, Angie tells him. Go for a walk.

They had married right after high school. Lived with her parents in Bensonhurst and moved to President Street near Carroll Street Park when they needed more room. That was the best place, he felt. Families  strollers, dogs, people who could tell the town your family came from just by looking at your face.

It was familiar. As familiar as this street now is unfamiliar, with three cars in the driveways and closed windows and doors.  

It’s been ten years since they moved here, when people were beginning to move out of the city. Because of the schools. The cost of everything. Real estate. Before the bubble popped.

But the move was not what he expected. Not that he’s said a word about it to Angie. He doesn’t know how she feels. Maybe she has friends here. He knew the kids once did.

The uneasy quiet lasts all day now. How could Angie have tolerated this day after day, year after year? After the kids left. With no car. She never learned to drive. Only her cousin Marie in Larchmont to give her a ride when she needed one.

The Koreans gave him two-thirds of what he’d asked for in cash. He still owns the building. They pay him the rest in monthly installments plus rent. It seemed like a good deal. They had no lawyers. He thought that was best. The brokers and the lawyers take too much. And, for what?

Angie is on the phone in the bedroom with her sister Concetta. He hears her consoling voice. Concetta’s Salvatore is gone now a year. He’d left her something but not enough. Maybe it once seemed like enough. And then the COVID. The Espositos, the Santarpias, and the Ingoglias. All gone. Died or moved. Only the church is there for her. Morning and evening mass. Thank God, Concetta always says. That and her women’s group on Wednesday afternoons.

He gets up and moves closer to the bedroom door. Angie’s soft voice, Yes, I know, she says, Maybe it will get better, Con. God willing. You never know.

Hearing her voice, the caring in it, he thinks, She is all I have. All that matters. All he needs.

He should tell her that. And that there is nothing for him here. For them. They should move back to the city. Sell the house. Sublet an apartment. Cobble Hill. Carroll Gardens. Not a big place. Maybe with a back garden. Near Concetta. Maybe stay with her till they find a place. Sell the car. Who needs a car in the city?

They would have Saint Cecilia’s and the park. He would have places to walk. The smell of the bakeries. The pizzerias. Kind faces. People to talk to. The city. The constant sounds of mothers and children. Rhythmic life. He could find work part-time. Somebody could always use someone with experience.

And then of course, he thinks, when the time might come, Concetta would be there for Angie after he’s gone. Not so soon, God willing, but sometime.

Angie is quiet now. He imagines her sitting on the side of the bed. Her fingers touching her forehead. Her eyes closed. Her sister on her mind. Heavy.

He goes to the sink. Finishes the dishes. Scrubs the pots. Dries them all, stacks  and arranges them in cabinet. Pats his shirt for his cigarettes. His pants. An old habit.

This time he will ask Angie to help. She has a clear head. She wouldn’t rush into anything. She would have handled the Koreans differently. He knows that now. She’s never said that to him, but he knows. She wouldn’t bring it up. He wishes she would.

Angie comes up behind him, Vito, she says, Concetta told me the city has changed. You wouldn’t recognize Court Street now. She says the Chinese are buying up stores and the brownstones. The prices are crazy, and the Moroccans and Yemenis are moving in. Why can’t they stay on Atlantic Avenue? I told her maybe she should sell her place and move up here and live with us. You know, get out of the city. Wouldn’t that be good?”

Angie wraps her arms around Vito’s shoulders, kisses the back of his neck as she always does, and holds him tight.

Slow Dancing

Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.

“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”

It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.

They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.

Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.

The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.

No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.

“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.

“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would  turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.

He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.

That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.

No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.

The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.

The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.

And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.  

A Life in the Rearview

David Bellingham nodded to the usher as he passed by and he took a seat in a pew by the open window. It was in the last row on the righthand side as you faced the front of the sanctuary. The back of the pew pressed hard against his spine. He was prone to slouching and straight-backed seats like this one were uncomfortable for him.

He wondered, did people choose seats on one side or another at a funeral as you did at a wedding. More likely as not, one did, he thought. Families and friends being what they were. They were no different at funerals than they were at weddings were they. Maybe, he thought, there was an even greater cause for internecine animus at a funeral.

Nonetheless, he sat where he sat and that was that. Besides, would where he sat make any difference? Make him feel any less like an interloper of sorts? Any more than he was already feeling?

He knew next to no one there, and, of course, that was to be expected. The people he knew or who knew him were dwindling, were they not?

Outside the window, the tops of trees down the hill, across the lake, rustled in the breeze. The sound they might have been making didn’t reach him, though the breeze through the window brushed across his skin. His mind wandered. Drifted.

When they called his name, he touched his hand to his jacket pocket. His notes. An Ativan. A Clif Bar. His water bottle. He got up and walked up the side aisle and negotiated the short flight of stairs to the microphone. He tapped it. God, he thought, must everyone in the world do that?

Hear cleared his throat. “We met,” he began, “in September of ‘57. The year the Dodgers left New York for LA. He was new. It was junior high and everyone that year was new. We all came from different parts of town. But he was from a different town.

“I remember that he looked lost. Maybe not lost, but he had this solitary look about him. The way he looked around. The concavity of his expression. He looked, I think, like I was feeling.

“You have bike?” I asked him. He shook his head. You play basketball? ‘Yeah,’ he said.

“In Phys Ed, we shot baskets at one of the nets on the side of the gym by the bleachers. He would shoot these jump shots from the corner. He’d say, ‘Fall back, baby!’ when he hit one. Those were not high percentage shots but that’s what he liked. We’d go to the outdoor courts after school and shoot around and then we’d play one-on-one.

“And there was this one day. I remember it was cloudy. I don’t know why I remember that but, we were playing, and I thought he was going to take one of those corner jumpers, but he didn’t. He drove straight at me, and I had my hands up, my arms up, my hip into his, and he went to the hoop for a layup. He didn’t stop. Just banged into me and, and I can feel him coming into me at this moment as I stand here, and his shoulder slammed into me, right under my arm, and it snapped his shoulder. He just crumpled. He fell down, and some old guy came over and he yanked on his arm, and I could hear the bone pop back into the socket. I was shaking. Felt sick. He was sweating like crazy, and I thought he was going to faint, but he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ll take the foul.’

“His mother made us good sandwiches and he had a nice sister. One day after school he told me that Miss Bergman, the English teacher, who he thought had a crush on him, told him he was an iconoclast. I didn’t know what that meant.”

“One year, this was the year before we graduated, we went to see a Chiffons concert in the city together, and after the show he said to me that one of them, the one on the left, the really cute one, was looking at him the whole entire show. I told him I thought she was looking at me. ‘You believe what you want to believe,’ he said.’

“Then the next year, after we graduated, it was May or June, he called me on a pay phone from upstate. He said, ‘Can you pick me up at the AmTrak station?’

“Why?”

“I flunked out,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I was sorry, I told him, but I was really glad to have him home. I didn’t say so. So, we went straight to Roberta’s in the Bronx for pizza and a beer.

“We went to Knicks games. Bradley, Frazier, Monroe and Willis Reed. He was my best man, and I was his. We were both crazy young. Too young and too crazy to know we were too young and too crazy.”

“One year, it was ’69, he called me, ‘Come over and we’ll watch the moon landing together. The four of us did. We sat on the floor in his living room and ate tacos. And afterwards he said, ‘You think that whole thing was for real?’

“Yeah, why?”

“’No reason. Just saying, I guess.’” That was exactly the kind of thing he would say.”

“We used to talk about the kids. Vacations. Work. Where the country was heading. Where the world was heading. We still do. Talk about kids and vacations and the country. Not still, I mean, but you know what I mean. It was always grounded in the here and now. The present. Covid shots. Hearing aids. Knee replacements. Shingles.

“A few years ago, he started talking about how old we were getting. It was like, aches and pains and surgeries. And he’d always say how he could see us one day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wearing hats and overcoats and looking out at the water. Sort of like the Simon and Garfunkel song. And he’d always say that we’d be mumbling things indistinctly in one another’s direction and we’d be nodding our heads like we heard and understood.

“But, you know, we never really talked about the rest of it. The ‘what happens after the mumbling stops’ kind of thing. Other than joking about being euphemistically ‘gone.’ I don’t know what he believed. I mean really. I think we had different ideas, but I’m not so sure about that. I never really asked him, in just those same words.”

He paused speaking.

“Oh, yes, and one last thing that he would say to me, ‘You know, David, I’ve been down so long, it is beginning to look like up to me.” I always thought he made that one up. I was sure of it. Anyway, I liked thinking that. Besides maybe Richard Farina was the one who stole it from him. That’s possible.”

He looked out at all the faces of all. There were mostly smiles all around. People he didn’t know or didn’t recognize. You could see he figured that that was as good a time as any to stop.

So, he walked back down the steps. Back to the pew at the end of the aisle, near the open window and he watched the trees across the lake rustling without saying anything and he could feel the breeze brush against his skin.

The Way Things Work Out

When Bix was young and newly married, before he had a child of his own, when he knew all he needed to know about pretty much everything; most everything that mattered; most everything that mattered to him; he knew a couple who had a young child, an infant. Brown-eyed like her father. Soft black hair. A pinched chin like her mother. He was sure that with a pencil, a piece of paper, a Punnett square, and a few minutes he could suss out all the probabilities of that combination happening. It was just dominants and recessives. Like heads and tails. That was what he knew, what most people knew then; dominants, recessives, and probabilities. Probabilities ruled.

He’d been in college with Vincent, the father of the young child. A philosophy major. The mother had been a teacher where Bix taught high school Bio. So, they were all friends. Not close, but friends. People he knew. Not that well. But none of that really matters. They were just two people he knew who had a child. A girl. Maybe two or three weeks old, maybe six months. He didn’t pay too much attention to other people’s children then.

What he knew then about children was that, if things worked out, most of the time, probably, when you had one, there’d be a few months of listening to their soft breathing in the dark room next door, lifting your head to the sound of a call or a cough, holding your breath until another cough came, or a swallow, a cry, or the rustling of a shoulder finding a new resting place by the side of the crib. And you’d turn your head back to the hollow of your pillow and fall back to sleep while someone else fed it or changed its diaper.

That’s if things worked out.

He and his wife had visited them, the couple, once, on an unusually warm November evening. The child was named Clair. Clair de lune. He could see her rounded face from across the room, resting in the angle of her mother’s arm, partially hidden by a thin flannel cover.

After the child had been put to bed and quieted, they all sat in the living room.

The couple kept the door to the child’s room ajar and would take turns getting up to bring drinks, clear plates or whatever, and stopping to listen at the child’s door in the lighted hallway. They’d then come back and sit on the couch for a few minutes.

After a while, Bix’s wife said, “We should go now and let you two get some sleep while you can.”

“No, no,” said Vincent, his friend, the philosophy major.

“Oh, my goodness, are you sure? I wish you could stay longer,” said the child’s mother, Lindy, or Lorraine, he couldn’t recall which, and she went into their bedroom coming back with their coats.

On the drive home he thought, they fuss so much. Worry too much. He’d said so to his wife. She turned from looking out the window to look at him.

And then he and Mara had children. Twins.

He found himself thinking of Vincent and Lindy. And of himself back then, when he knew so much about so little and so little about so much. How little he knew then of wakeful nights when every sound in the dark comes freighted with ancient, existential, fear, alerted to every nuance of sound, nerves as taut as a mousetrap in a kitchen cupboard, and of gratefulness in the morning after a peaceful, uneventful, night believing, hoping, that things would work out as they had done last night. The way probability says it should work out, the way it should work out in a well-ordered, teleological, universe. The right way.

For Vincent and Lindy, and their little girl, Clair, it did not work out so well.

A few short weeks after Bix and Mara had put on their coats and said good night, and after they drove home thinking about what they would or would not do when they had children, and then about work and other things and other people, they heard the sad news about the child. About how the child had died in bed during the night; one night, not that night, but a different night. Another night of listening to the silence through the child’s open door.

And, somehow, even then, he shoved that into the recycling bin of his thoughts … because things usually work out well, don’t they? But deep down knowing that the improbable is not the impossible. Else, why read horror stories or watch Stephen King films to attest to your own invulnerability?

And then, for Bix, the years of parental basal-metabolic worry came and went; listening to soft breathing and mashing bananas to silky sweet smoothness evolved into cutting grapes in half, and blowing across hot bowls of vegetarian vegetable soup, sitting on edge on the edge of a sandbox in the park, and figuring out how to remove a square piece of cut carrot from deep in a squirming nostril. Saving growth charts and Crayola drawings of Mommy, a calendar of milestones, and progress reports and SAT scores.  He  heard his own voice say, “Did you do your homework?” “Who’s driving tonight?” “No matter what you have done or what time it is, call me and I’ll be there in five minutes to pick you up,” and “Because I said so.”

And so, having traveled that far, like Bix, you figure things will all work out okay.

Then your kids get married and move away, or just move away, just as you had hoped would happen, knew would happen, feared would happen, and you wait for texts or phone calls. Track them on Find My Friends. And maybe they come back after a rough breakup or needing space to figure out what they really want to do or who they really are. And when they go again you say our door is always open. And even when they call you with biopsy results, you say, because you believe it, as he had come to believe it, that things will work out okay though you know that only sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t. And you suffer when they don’t and fret when they do.

And so, if it all works out, as it did for Bix, one day they do come back, and tell their own kids to sit quietly, and they stand by the door to your bedroom with a tissue in one hand and a glass in the other. And they listen to your breathing, and read to you, and kiss your forehead at midnight, and ask, “Are you warm enough?” “Can I get you water or anything?” And then they will all go to sit in the living room and talk quietly among themselves and wait for you to fall asleep.

The Long Orderly Life of Morrison G. Heffermann

Morrison Heffermann awoke to footsteps scuffing on the wooden stairs up to his bedroom.

Morse?

A familiar voice. His father’s voice? His bed is wet. Shivering in the cold. His father will find him once again soaked in his own pee. Wet sheets wrapped tight round his knees and ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse?”

The bedroom door is knocked and rattled and banged and pushed open.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here.

Morse?”

“It must be a hundred.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Syd, open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Syd, can you get him up?”

“Don’t turn it on!”

“We have to. Have you had anything to drink today? Get him some water.”

“It’s me, May, Morse. Can you sit up? Let Syd help you up.”

“May?”

“Go get him some water. I’ll help him up.”

“I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

“Yes… give me my robe, please.”

“Get him his robe. And turn the AC on for God’s sake.”

“Don’t turn it on. It uses up too much electricity. It’s old and won’t last long.”

“But it’s so damn hot in here. You won’t last as long as it will if you don’t let us turn it on.”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Syd will help you. Let Syd help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“Can you get up?”

“Help me. I can’t get my balance. Not under that shoulder.”

“I’ll get you something to eat, okay?”

“Close the door, Syd. Just help me get my damn shorts down so I can sit down and get that pad on.”

“May, call 911. He’s fainting.”

“Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I’m not leaving my house.  I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Dammit. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.”

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties at night.

Morse Heffermann was a Navy man, he joined right out of high school. After Pearl Harbor. Air crewman. Pacific coast patrol bombers.

After the war, he met Margret. In two months’ time they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottningholm, and then by bus to Stockholm. They stayed with her parents a week.

In Boston, they both took whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter.

He started a business and kept it for forty years, working the phone out of his home selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was right to do.

Margret died young and the daughter left home. For fifty-five years he kept the old house.

He paid the bills on time, read books on the war and every book by David McCullough, Goodwin, Tuchman, Caro, and Mantel. He remembered each one. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm running. Saved every nickel, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Never spoke ill of another person. Kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit the lights only when he needed one and shut them off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and heated up Swanson’s dinners in the oven. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You keep to yourself, keep your affairs in order, prepare well, make plans, and stick to them. That’s all you need.

He handwrote his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law, Syd. The one who had married Agatha, his daughter. His only daughter. And then she too died, young and fresh like her mother had.

He had files and note cards for everything. “Do not touch” labels in uniform squared blue ink caps taped to light switches, the radio, bookcases, file cabinets, the stove, and cupboards.

He catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, and a hot coffee in front of him.

After Syd and May got him down in the stair chair, he ate an egg, a cup of coffee, and then fell asleep at the table.

He’d told May that he’d had nothing to eat or drink for days. He’d ridden the stair chair up to his room and lay down a few days ago when it got real hot. How many days, he didn’t know. He had asked her to bring him back up there after he finished eating and told her to call no one else and to shut the door and lock it when she left.

When she could not waken him the next morning, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the County hospital. You can’t make me leave my own house! He refused treatment on the gurney. They moved him from the ER to a room. He took no food. No drink. He accepted only pain medication. Nothing more.

“We can’t let him do that, May!”

“We can. What else are we going to do, Syd? Have them tie him down and shove a PEG tube in his gut, stick an IV drip in his arm, and a Foley up his tiny you know what? We have no right to do that. No one does.”

“We’re his only family, May. We can’t let him die like that?”

“We can, Syd. Because we are the only family he has. It’s his life, not yours or mine. We need to let him live the last days he has the way he has lived every other day in his whole life. Let him be who he is. Please, just let him be.”

Border Crossing at Halls Stream Road

He found a place on the map just west of Halls Stream Road, upstream from Beecher’s Falls, where the road bends left and the stream bends right and the border lies just west of both of them. Where the stream is wide and shallow, hidden in the trees, and you can see the farms in Canada so clear and near you could high arc a baseball and hit the bright white side of the closest one.

His pack holds his passport, chlorine tabs, matches, phone, tarp, and Clifbars. A flashlight. Water bottle and meds for a week. He considered packing his father’s fixed-blade Hunter knife, though he had no coherent picture of why, or how, he might use it if the need arose, nor what that need might be. What if he was stopped by a patrol and they found it?

He’d once before felt the need to leave. In Nixon’s War. In the draft. Quakers handed out pamphlets from platforms and wished him well. The fear to him was visceral. In his gut and the options were to him like trees in fog. The language of 4-F, 2-S, and 1-A made it seem that way. So too, the muddily ill-defined illegality of it. As was, he thought, the war itself. The moral dilemmas. Was there honor or safety anywhere. He waited, considered what would happen to him at the border, so he never left. He aged out in ‘69. No decision being the decision.

The waves of dread and worries came with the seasons. Daily, almost. Diffuse, becoming sharper. Oppressive. Accreting like rust and corrosion. Kent State. Reagan. Bush. Bush. Iran Contra. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Columbine. Sandy Hook. “How’s that hopey changing thing working out for you?” Tea Party Two. McConnell. Proud Boys. Q. Trump’s odd inchoate internecine war. The great carbon bootprint. All that is solid undermining all that had once seemed so certain, so solid. Marx, vilified unheeded: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

“Why are you doing this?” she said to him. “We’re okay here. There’s no danger. Is there?”

I worry every day, he told her. January 6, new-breed warriors. Waiting for Kristallnacht. “That won’t happen here,” she said.

Then January 6, again, he said.

But, it’s more than that. He told her, I don’t want to live anymore in a country like this. The oily grasping. Condoned. Encouraged by corrupting militaristic capital. They own it all and still want more. We bleed debt and blood in the streets. No one cares for long enough to do anything. I want to feel free. I don’t want to die never knowing better.  

He left a note. Wait to hear from me.

In Queechee, in the parking lot near the gorge, he met a man with a car. I’ll give you half now, he offered. They drove north beneath an August-green awning.

Stop here, he said. The stream there was slow and shallow. The white-sided farm across the way. Quiet, like a softcover children’s book.

He paid the driver the other half. He lets the car turn and leave.

This is not El Paso. He knows that. He is no Nicaraguan. He is only who he is.

It is all relative in degree. He could no longer live the American life. Dumbed-down, consumer capital-driven life, politically oligarchic corporate greed. A duplicitous mythical monopoly game of liberty and justice for none, where people go hungry, unhoused, profiled, drugged and hopeless.

In the stream up to his knees. He walked with the current, along the slow edge.

A mile or two. Then south along the Canadian side of the road. Vermont over there to the left. He was free. Sort of. He tipped up a sip of water in the shade. Alert for what or who might be lurking. Following.

Let them stop me, he thought. No one did.

He pressed open the door of the first café he saw. The first town. Ordered a Tim Horton’s and a roll. Took a seat by a wide window. Watched people come and go. He’d planned nothing further along than this. No more than sitting right there. Passing unmeasured minutes. Unbothered. Maybe this is how it will be. He doesn’t know. He will soon gather his things, step outside. Call home.

Ronald Reagan’s Christmas Cookies

Greg Molson followed the recipe for gingerbread cookies he’d found in his sloppy, falling-apart, copy of The Joy of Cooking, page 662:

Beat softened butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in molasses. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture in three parts, alternating with the water. On a floured surface, roll the dough to your preferred thickness.

His copy was the one bought years ago for his wife, before they’d gotten married. The one he’d wrapped and carried in his suitcase on their trip to the Sha-wan-ga Lodge Resort and Conference Center, where they stayed for a three-day, four-night honeymoon in the sweltering Catskill Mountains, among waves of shrill families, clouds of mosquitos, a tight circle of faux-log cabins, six varieties of flapjacks and canned fruit cocktail at each meal, and a deep green lake with unseen slimy, slithery, scaled things that rubbed up against his bare legs like a school of subaquatic feral cats.

“Just so you know, Greg,” Marsha said, on the ride home from the Catskills to their new apartment in Yonkers, holding a cigarette tipped toward the open car window, “Just so you’re not surprised, when we get back, I don’t cook.” 

When she moved out, leaving him after seven slow years of increasingly insurmountable, unavoidable, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences between them, Joy was the one book Marsha left behind for him on the kitchen counter.

Of course, she ate. Certainly, she ate. She ate with relish and gusto. That was something, in fact, that Molson liked so much about her. She loved food. All food. Italian, French, Chinese, burgers, shrimp scampi, pizza, mac and cheese, chow fun, and noodle kugle. Her mother cooked for her. Her grandmother cooked. Her brother-in-law cooked. Her friends cooked. But, in their overheated Hertz rental with the windows down, heading south on the Taconic Parkway, she told him clearly, emphatically, resolutely, and in no uncertain terms, that she did not, could not, and would not cook.

He was disappointed to hear her say that. He didn’t say so in so many words.

“Oh,” he said.

So, by dint of circumstance and dedication, never having cooked a meal before in his life, he found himself going into markets, filling shopping carts and brown bags with handles with what he needed. He stocked the cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, and breadbox. He learned to cook. He learned to love it. He found rest and refuge in it.

Joy became his bible.

And, so, when Marsha and he went their separate ways, he made, ate, and served to others what made him happy. He worked hard. And he came home each evening to a kitchen of respite and re-charge.

The idea for gingerbread cookies came from the need to bake something Christmassy to give to the people he worked with. They made, boxed, and ribboned packages of miniature pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse, which they handed out with big grins at the holiday party. Gingerbread cookies seemed to be just the right thing.

He mixed, cooled, and rolled the dough. Set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and separated out the gingerbread figures. They lay flat and brown on the parchment paper, looking up at him.

And standing at the counter with his floured fingers, he felt moved somehow at that moment, an irresistible urge to draw a gentle, curved, line of a mouth into each figure. A thin, up-turned, simulacrum of a smile.

He took one step back and looked at them. Their arms and legs outstretched. Their dotted eyes. Their smiling faces.

A slow smile came to his lips. It grew and broadened. And he began to laugh. A big, loud, head-tipped-back, open-mouthed, laugh. A nothing-held-back, totally uninhibited, burst of child-like laughter. He was overtaken, carried away by his own laughter echoing in his empty kitchen.

He felt an expansive release from deep within. His body, weary and sleep-deprived, let loose an anthem of inchoate joy. A feeling so surprising and foreign to him that he could find no word to give it.

He laughed in wonderment and deep awareness. How, almost out of the blue, had a bunch of corny cookie faces which, just a moment before, had been blank, and on which, with the tip of a fork and the curved edge of a spoon, he had drawn a simple smile, had looked up at him and had done this to him?

And so, with intention and only a moment’s pause, he turned the spoon around and he pressed a narrow furrow of a frown into one of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made him laugh, he felt a sadness grip him, and he began to cry.

Tears welled in his eyes and overflowed his cheeks. Crying as he could not ever remember doing in his entire life other than the day his mother had left him at the door of his kindergarten class on the very first day of school and turned away from him leaving him in the doorway in the firm grip of the tall sharp-faced, Mrs. Howell, and closed the door behind her.

He cried without trying to stifle it. Unselfconsciously. Without covering his eyes. Crying. Letting go, he felt, of days, and months, and years of submerged, un-cried sadness.

A sadness, only then at that very moment, so clearly to him that his skin prickled with gooseflesh, that he knew it was not for himself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and every other one of the friends he had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces he’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia.

Men and women, younger than him, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed.

And then he laid all of the cookies, smiling and frowning, in careful rows on the baking sheet and he cried and laughed as he looked from one of them to another and, when he felt ready, he opened the oven door, and wiped his eyes. Grateful, in a way, that he had known each and every one of them.

In the Last Days There Will Come Times of Difficulty (2 Timothy: 1-2)

Morse Sheffield lay alone in his bed in the late heat of August. Shades pulled down against the sun, darkening the room. The air, close and heavy. A thin sheet over him. He is dreaming his unpleasant dreams.

Someone on the stairs. Two of them. His father. Leave the cat alone. Do your homework. His mother. Come take your bath. Morse? Morrison? You hear me? Cold and wet. Dust in the air and in his mouth. Knocking on the door. Go away. I’m not dressed. He’d wet the bed again. His legs would not move. Tangled sheets around his ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse? Are you here?”

A hand pushes against the door.

“He’s in here,” one of them, a young woman, says.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here. Morse? Morse?”

“It must be a hundred in here.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Simon, open that window. Morse?

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Can you get up?”

“It’s Didi, Sigrid’s daughter, Morse. Can you sit up? Do you need help?”

Didi.

“Do you have any water? Simon, go get him some water. Help him up.”

I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

Yes. Can you give me my robe?

“Get him his robe. And turn on the air conditioner.”

“Don’t turn it on. Leave it. I don’t want it on.”

“But it’s so hot in here, you’ll die. Get him some water. Do you want some water?”

I need to go to the bathroom.

“Simon will help you. Morse, Simon will help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“It’s Simon, Morse, can you get up? Morse, lean over this way.”

I can’t. Don’t touch that shoulder.

Simon walks with Morse into the bathroom, helps him turn and eases back him down on the toilet seat.

“Are you okay in there?”

Don’t come in. Just help me get my shorts down.

“Ask him if he wants something to eat. Should I call 911?”

Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I will not go. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Please. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.

For over a week, the heat had been oppressive. Over ninety each day. The nights unbearable.

Sigrid, who came in to clean once a month, is the one who had found him. She knocked on the bedroom door. He told her to leave. To go away. She called the brother. The one with the house by the water. The only family of his she knew. No answer. She called her daughter Didi.

“You have to come to Mr. Sheffield’s house. He’s in his bedroom with the door closed and it’s a hundred and ten up here. He won’t let me go in.

Morse Sheffield had been a Navy man. He joined right out of high school. 1944. An air crewman, flying patrol bombers on the Pacific coast.

He met Margret in college. In ’55 they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the freighter Drottningholm to meet her parents in Stockholm. They married there and, after Oslo, Paris, and London, they made a home back on the east coast, in the town where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had grown up.  

He had no trouble finding work. Enjoyed working, no matter the job. He was gregarious. They liked his attitude.

He and Margret were together. They had a daughter. Life had no end.

Then Margret died and, soon after, Agatha got married and moved away.

He stayed in their small dark house on the corner of a quiet street up the hill from the center of town. His sadness weighed him down.

One winter he’d fallen down the back stairs carrying a bucket of trash out to the garage and he lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw him. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked his neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You have no right to take me anywhere. This is my home. Getting old is not a crime. I want to stay in my home. This is my home, and you have no right to take me from it. Living alone is not a crime.

The officer helped him back up the stairs, made a note in his notepad and said, “Mr. Sheffield, you’d better get someone to put a railing up along the stairs there for you.”

Thirty-five more years he lived there. Went working in an office in a nearby town, keeping house, paying the bills on time, reading books on the war, Lincoln, the depression. All the presidents. He kept his Saab running, saved his money, trusted few people, had fewer friends. Year after year. Solitary. Thoughtful. Kind. Carefully generous. Never speaking ill of another. Keeping things in order. Was he happy? It was not a question anyone would think to ask him.

He started his own business and kept it going for a few years, working out of his home, selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death.

He’d say that keeping your affairs in order, preparing and planning, not being a burden, was what mattered. He wrote a will. Leaving the house to his son-in-law. The one who had married Agatha. His only child. His only daughter, who died young and fresh, just like her mother had.

He turned the lights off when he left a room. Wrote reminder notes to himself and thank-you and birthday cards to others. He cooked when he was able and ate what he made, and then later, when he couldn’t manage the pots and pans, heated up the Swanson’s pot pies and frozen dinners in the microwave. He didn’t renew his tickets to the symphony. He had to stop walking to the beach and the market and the bookstore.

He wrote notes with detailed instructions in uniform capital letters and taped them up on everything. “Unplug when not in use” over light switches. “Do not touch” on bookshelves, file cabinets, the stove, cupboards.

He catalogued boxes of 35 mm prints, names, dates, and places on the back. Made notes of thoughts and quotes and left them folded in the books he’d read. David McCullough. Goodwin. Tuchman. Caro. The Bible.

Didi waited at the bottom of the stairs. Simon had helped Morse fit himself into the stairlift. He rode down holding on to the armrests, in his slippers and his robe.

She had opened the back door and the window above the sink. He ate the eggs and sausage and sipped the tea she prepared for him, eating without speaking, and when he’d had enough, he asked Simon to help him go back upstairs.

You’re both kind, he told them. I don’t want you to call anyone, and please shut the door when you leave.

In the evening, Didi returned with a small dinner she prepared. When she could not waken him, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the local hospital. He refused treatment and was moved to a bed near a window in the nursing home nextdoor. He took no food. He accepted only pain medications he could take with a sip of water.

Morse Sheffield passed away in bed in a quiet room near a window. Neither in the bed of his dreams nor in the one or in the manner of his own choosing.

It’s Life. Period. Goodbye

Jake Greenfield brought in the mail. Careful not to let his cats out.

Among the bills and flyers was a green square envelope.

He shut the door firmly and ran his finger under the envelope flap. He removed a note card.

“Dear Jake, My dearest brother Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.” No further details, except that a memorial was planned at Sam’s home in Essex on the coming Sunday afternoon.

It was signed “Rebecca, Sam’s Sister, PS, I would love to hear from you.”

Jake sat on a chair beside the kitchen table. He took a long slow breath. Holding the card in his lap.

“Sam,” he said.

In high school they called Sam “the Russian.” He was not Russian. His last name was Rudski. So, they called him the Russian. His family was Polish. Maybe. Maybe Slovak. Maybe Latvian. Nobody knew or cared. Neither did he.

He was quick to smile. Quick to say, “Do what you guys want, I’m going home,” and the only one who saw no reason not to eat the last slice of pizza. 

There were three of them back then. Jake, Bob, and Sam, who hung out together. Played ball together. Driver’s licenses. First legal beers. College.

When Kennedy was shot, they watched the TV together. Then Oswald. Jack Ruby raising his right arm straight out from his shoulder, with the Dallas police and the reporters in black felt fedoras standing around, and he shot Oswald square in the belly with a pistol he’d pulled out of his overcoat pocket. Oswald winced.

They drove down to DC in Sam’s VW and waited in the dark cold wind outside of the Capitol to walk past the quiet coffin and then over to Lafayette Park, to sit on a blanket under the trees on the curb across from the White House. They watched Bobby, Jackie, Caroline, and John John walk behind the casket.

What they were seeing was unfathomable. They were nineteen. It was something never to be forgotten.

Sam was the first among them to fall in love. The girl lived up in White Plains. He sent her flowers and after he paid for them, he called Jake to say, “alea iacta est,” like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The die was cast, he said.

Everything they did or said back then was concrete, momentous, consequential, black and white, final, irrevocable. Neither good nor bad. It just was. They never gave a thought to any time beyond the present. Who they were was who they’d always be. There were no thoughts of the future beyond which shirt you would put on in the morning or which classes you had the next day.

Then there were weddings. First jobs. Children. They each moved away. None of them went to Vietnam. They grew beards and long hair. Bob worked for a big Pharma company. Jake got teaching job. Sam got a job working for Anaconda Copper right out of Fordham.

One day he showed up at Jake’s house. “I quit,” he said. “They are just fucking up Chile, paying people shit wages, mining the crap out of the ground. Capitalist shitheads,” he said. “They don’t give a shit about anything other than screwing people for profits. I can’t do that anymore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I got a teaching job in Roxbury.”

“Where’s that?”

“Boston,” he said.

“A good job?”

“Boston’s all fucked up. Desegregation. Bussing. Crazy racists attacking school buses. Throwing rocks and bottles at kids. Retrenchment. Poverty. I’ll teach in one of the schools.”

“Oh.” Jake knew nothing about Boston or Roxbury. He was teaching in the Bronx. The South Bronx. High school biology. Things were not good there either.

They all moved around again. Grad schools. New jobs. Not necessarily better jobs but jobs they liked to think were better.

After another move, Jake got a call from Sam. “I moved to Essex. I found your number in the phone book.” They went out for burgers and beer at a place called the Farm or the Barn and talked about work and their new hearing aids.

When Jake got laid off in 2008, he started doing freelance work. Writing. Sam became a psychologist and stopped selling sandwiches and DVDs. They kept in touch.

One afternoon, Sam rode his new Yamaha 500 over to Jake’s. They sat in folding chairs on his back porch. They wore warm jackets and drank hot coffee.

“You look sad,” Sam said.

“Sad? I don’t know. You know I had a heart attack a year ago.”

“You told me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, and you said you were doing fine.”

“I was.  I still am. A lot of stuff going on. I’m okay.”

“Listen, Jake,” said Sam. “I see patients all day long, and they say, ‘yeah, I’m okay,’ and I look at them and I know they’re not. We both know they’re not. I look at them. They look at me. Their eyes. The way they sit all folded up, looking out the window. They start talking and in three minutes tops, I get the whole picture. I’d love to say to them, ‘Look, we can drag this on for a few months or years and neither of us wants to do that. So, give me the word and I can tell you right now exactly what your problem ia and what you can do to change it. Period. Goodbye.’”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying. I know you. You lost your job, and you had a heart thing, and you have a hearing problem. It’s life. You had a lousy marriage and that’s over, and now you have great one. Something’s bothering you but it’s not the job or money or your heart, or your hearing. You think I don’t have shit going on? You think the guy next door doesn’t? Look around. See the trees. You have food in the refrigerator. You have a woman who loves you. I’ll tell you right now, what your problem is. You haven’t told her how you’re feeling. You’re holding it all in. Like your father. Go in there and tell her what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what you’re worried about. And twenty minutes from now, guaranteed, she’s going to grab you and hug you and the sun will come out and light up your sorry-ass face like high noon on the goddamn equator.”

That day on the porch was the last time Jake saw Sam.

The letter surprised him. He never expected, never thought, that one day he’d be sitting in a chair by his kitchen table holding a letter saying, “Dear Jake, My dearest brother, Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.”

Just like that.

“Jake,” he could hear Sam saying, “it’s life. There is no secret. Nothing to figure out. It’s life. Period. Goodbye.”

Considering Salvation at the Corner of Ninth and Seventh

Eric Winsome was stuck. At a veritable standstill. Physically, stopped in traffic behind a late model blue Toyota Camry on 7th Avenue at the corner of 9th Street, and existentially, locked in a self-imposed worry-worn straitjacket of self-absorbed spiritual stagnation.

The light at the corner was green but a crammed B67 bus, lights flashing, kneeled, angling into the intersection in front of Smiling Pizza, picking up a line of passengers: Men in work boots with lunch buckets, women with shopping carts, drooling infants, juuling teenagers, and homeless souls with sacks of clattering bottles and cans bound for redemption.

Louise Little, the driver in the Toyota, her NicoDerm patch running on empty, held a cigarette in her taut quivering lips and a Zippo in her right fist tapping on the steering wheel to the Deep Purple Smoke on the Water guitar riff, which she had not gotten out of her head since she woke up this morning. In nine seconds, tops, she would either light up the god-damn Newport or run the yellow light the instant the lousy bus gave her a chance.

Eric’s fog-like crisis of faith was, simply, his unwavering acceptance of the Calvinist sublapsarian belief in predestination and in the decree made by God before the Fall that he would choose from among the living, those to be saved, and those not. Eric was thirty-four and he could not know within which group he’d be counted. How could anyone know? he thought. Worry and doubt consumed his every waking moment. Not the least of his worries, though, was whether Wendy, the woman he loved, and to whom he had plighted his troth just shy of seven years ago, would be in the same state of candidacy for eternal salvation as he hoped he was. He had his reasonable doubts.

“Seven years,” she had told him, “is one hell of a long time for a woman to wait for you to make a decision. I can’t wait for ever. My mother keeps asking me, will he, or won’t he?” Just this morning, waiting to brush her teeth in his apartment while he took his time in the bathroom she said, “Eric, shit or get off the pot, I have to get to work, goddamnit.”

On the corner opposite Louise and Eric, stood Lois and Irv Rothstein, an elderly couple waiting for the light to change so they could cross the avenue and make their bus for the early-bird special at Juniors on Flatbush. Though they were resigned to the possibility of missing it, they retained the hope that, God-willing, the light would change before the bus righted itself and they could flag down the driver and make it across the street before it left the corner.

Irv watched the light. Louise watched the light. Lois watched the light. Eric watched the photo of Wendy he kept on taped to the dashboard in front of him, The B67 began its slow rise. The light changed. Louise lit her Newport. Irv and Lois began their walk across the avenue, waving and calling to the driver.

As she walked, Lois’s upper body swayed slightly from side to side. It was the thickening, stiffening, of the arthritis in her hips.

Her shoulders rocked first one way and then the other. It slowed her down, and Irv, a spare man, a few inches shorter than his wife, held tightly to the sleeve of her jacket, trying to keep her moving and on an even keel. He held on to the brim of his hat with his other hand.

The walk sign flashed, nearing the end of its orange digital countdown. 14…13… 12…

“Hold your horses,” said Lois to the young woman talking on her cellphone in the car behind the bus, her grim lips holding a cigarette in the driver’s side window, but it was only loud enough for Irv to hear.

“Come along, dear,” he said to her, with concern and considerable affection.

As the countdown reached three, they had made it safely to the opposite curb and then at the precise moment that the zero flashed, Lois turned to Irv, “I dropped my glove,” she said, and she lurched stiffly up onto the curb. Irv looked back.

The glove, in a shade of green that matched her jacket, which she had been holding in her free hand, and which Irv had bought for her on sale at the Conways in Manhattan for her birthday, lay half-way across the roadway. Irv let go of her arm, stepped back into the street, holding his hand up to the path of the traffic. Lois teetered.

Louise hit the gas at the green light and, when she saw the man, only a few feet or so from his outstretched arm, she slammed on the brake pedal and twisted the steering wheel to the right to avoid hitting him.

At that moment a car horn from behind Eric blew, startling him. He stepped on the gas, rear-ending Louise’s Toyota, inflating both of their airbags and pushing her car up onto the sidewalk hitting Lois squarely in her stiff hips and crushing her against the back of the B67.

Irv’s heart exploded with the impact of grief, and he fell to the pavement.

Louise was later saved by the ‘jaws of life.’

And Eric? He sustained, with vertebrae-cracking suddenness, multiple spinal cord ruptures causing his surgical team to place him in a medically induced coma until they would be able to assess the best course of action, if any existed, leaving him with only a 50-50 chance of survival and plenty of time to ruminate, in his solitude, on his chances of salvation.

Notes on the Celebration in Honor of The Essayist on his Ninetieth Birthday

The celebration in honor of a well-known essayist’s ninetieth birthday was held on the Saturday following his birthdate. A Saturday amidst the blistering heat of a northeastern July, an uptick in Covid-19 infections, fires in the west and in Europe, reports of a monkeypox outbreak among gay men, and news of the Pope’s visit to Canada to apologize for the church’s treatment of indigenous children.

Lily, the essayist’s wife, planned the celebration, addressed, stamped, and mailed the invitations, using names she gathered from the essayists address book.

Full vaccination required. No gifts. Regrets only. The invitation said and was signed simply in a firm hand, Lily.

At four, the room had filled with guests. The invitation had said, ‘four ‘til seven.’ Anyone who knew the essayist for any length of time had surely known that he was punctual and expected punctuality. He always made his expectations clear. He was a Marine.

He often told me, “If you’re on time, you’re late.” I took him figuratively though he meant it quite literally. “How does that work?” I’d ask him. “It just does,” he’d say.

No one spoke about the heat, or the pandemic, or the hearings on television, wearing masks, abortion, inflation, gasoline prices, Ukraine, or the media. All of that, they knew, was the essayists bailiwick. They found other things to talk about.

Prosecco in stemware and small hors d’oeuvres were passed on silver trays by young men and women wearing collared white shirts and black pants. The music from the speakers in the dining area set aside for the gathering was loud and conversation became difficult. Names were hard to hear.

“Guernsey?” I repeated, not really believing that could be the woman’s last name.

“No, it’s Gert Seavey,” she said.

I nodded.

I sat in a seat beside Lily. The essayist sat next to her at the head of the table. His three sons were there, sitting at another table. He looked over at them often.

After the dinner plates were removed, Lily stood and nodded to her three boys. The first one, the oldest, the one who had come in late, was the first to stand and speak.

““I just flew in from Paris, and the plane was late.”

“We all can see that,” said his father.

“I’m happy to be here, Dad,” said his son. “I have only one word to say to all of you that epitomizes my father best. Forgiveness.” Then he sat down. There was applause.

“Thank you,” said his father, so softly that only those of us closest to him could hear.

The second son spoke anecdotally, and then the essayist’s granddaughter raised her hand. “I love you, Boppa,” she said, “you are the smartest, funniest, and greatest man ever in the world.”

Her grandfather bowed his head. “Thank you,” he said to her.

Lily looked to the third son. He shook his head and didn’t get up, and so she walked to the end of the room, where it was the quietest. She asked the waiter to stop pouring wine.

She stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, and, because the curtains had not been drawn, she appeared briefly in silhouette surrounded in a halo of white light and seemed like a dark apparition in a dream or an afterimage following the sudden appearance of the Madonna.

She asked for quiet in a voice as soft as a dove and she turned to her husband, whose smile we all could see. From a pocket in her light-colored flowered dress, she read from notes she had written. She recounted how they had met and all of her husband’s many accomplishments in life and then she asked the essayist to come forward, and she kissed him on the cheek as they passed and returned to her seat at the table.

“That’s my first wife,” he said. “I always say that.”

The room quieted.

“You all know I have a tendency to be somewhat long-winded.”

“Nooohhh, Dad,” his sons said in unison.

“Please put your phones down and pay attention,” he said to us all.

He spoke without notes.

“There’s a line from Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, with an “E”, it goes something like ‘we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life back to when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire–a brain, a heart, a spirit.’”

“I dreamt last night that there are two paths forward for humans on earth. This earth, where we were born, where we live, and where we will die. The two paths are not mutually exclusive. And neither path is one that does our species credit.

“The vast majority of us are on a path we have no control over. Nine-nine percent of us, are on a path headed back in time to life at its most basic. Sweating in toil, planting the crops that will grow in the narrowing bit of land suitable for them, hunting what animals survive, and gathering the little water we need to live.

“Our disregard for water will be our undoing. Drought and flood and fires have already begun. You see it all around you. While corporations and governments husband our most essential natural resource for whatever profit they can make and power they can wield. We are watching the demise of most of what is human existence. We have set a rapidly degenerative system in motion by our lack of regard for the needs of society. One another. We have lost our social conscience.

“We had long survived as a species because we evolved as social animals. We need one another. But what we have done in the last two hundred years, as a result of our self-centered greed and avarice and our disregard for one another, has set us on a downward spiral which will consume us. Through starvation, drowning, unbearable temperature extremes, and the wars that will erupt and eliminate the rest of us, along with almost every other living species.

“We have brought this upon ourselves because we have not paid attention. We saw what was happening and we said that was somebody else’s problem and we kept on making plastic and burning oil and coal. How brutally ironic is it, is it not, that the lives of past plants and animals that inhabited this earth for millions of years before us, their very carbon souls, are what we are burning, and which will bury us and crush us under intense heat and unimaginable pressure back into carbon chains again, and that is all that will be left of us.

“It did not have to be this way. We have willfully disregarded the wisdom of the past generations who lived in concert with the land and the water and who were swept away by our greed and our guns and the rape of our natural resources. We laughed at their ignorant simplicity. Their traditions. We failed to learn from them and their respect for the mysterious power of nature.

“On the second, more narrow path, some few will survive. They will be the ones who had the privilege and resources unavailable to the rest. They may survive in small enclaves into a temporary future, perhaps using advanced AI computing and multidimensional printers to engineer some semblance of artificial nutrition and a livable environment.

But, surely, around them both, the earth and nature will heal itself, perhaps creating a natural re-arrangement of our DNA with the DNA and RNA from which we all came, and life on earth will go on. The Anthropocene epoch will end and surely, with it, other species will fill the gap.

“As Wolfe once said, you can’t go home again, and we cannot. Not when you have burned your home to embers and released the fumes into the atmosphere to smother you.

“So, pay attention. Love your family. Love one another. Love the life you have while you have it. Heal the earth in any way you can. Return to the simple life on the earth that created us in any way you can. Honor it. Eschew the false and artificial and disingenuous.

“That’s all there is and that’s all I have to say. Thank you for coming.”

And then the cake was plated and served. Coffee was poured. The essayist sat beside his wife and drank a glass of milk and then we said our goodbyes and went to our cars and drove back to our homes.

When We Were Mallards

When we first met, my husband, Mycola, told me that he thought we were like two ducks. Two mallards in a vast lake in a country far away. Like mallards, he said we were.

We were walking then, in our long overcoats, on a busy street in the city where we both lived. There were people and families all around us going into and out of shops and restaurants and sitting in the sun on benches in the park. Children running underfoot. Cars. Buses.

“Petra,” he said, as that was the name my mother called me by, “like we live in a mile-wide and ten-mile long lake with tall firs growing close to the very edge of the rocky shore, and plenty of places for us to build a nest and hide our ducklings in the reeds, whenever we would be fortunate enough to have them. And when the last of them grows up and flies away, we will swim side-by-side and stick our heads down deep below the surface and pull up bits of grass and noodle around for tiny crustaceans in the muck. And, we always be together and always be beautiful.

Sounds good, I told him.

And he said, “qwakk, qwakk.” And I loved him. You silly goose, I thought.

He is gone now and I live each day in great and constant misery. I live in a place of icy dark and metallic fear.

This is my life now, and for how much longer it will be I don’t know. This is not how it had been. When we were mallards. But that matters little now. Now, I cry and my body shakes so hard it is hard to take a breath. I wish for death but I only vomit.

I have no place to go. I have no home. No clothes apart from those I have on.

Two weeks ago, while we were sleeping, the door to our house was being battered and we could hear it beginning to buckle and break. Mycola and I woke my mother and our little girl and we ran out through the side door. We knew they were coming but none of us knew when that would be. We had heard the trucks but we thought they had passed through on their way to someplace else.

We ran in the rubble of the streets. My mother stumbled. She could no longer run. She fell and we tried to pick her up. She screamed in pain. She could not stand. Or she refused to get up. I don’t know.

Our entire world has been changed. We mean no harm to anyone. We hurt no one. Not once in my life have I hurt anyone.

I should say we meant no harm to anyone. Now, I have lost all my balance. My forgiveness.

When your mother has fallen and you cannot pick her up. When your child is running and trips on bricks and glass from the walls of the apartments your friends lived in on the fourth floor of the building you pass, and you can see their now-empty rooms and their broken, blackened, walls, and you see the face your daughter as she sees them too.

When you hear the crack and see the flashes and feel the air itself beat like a bully against your chest so hard it crushes you and a moment later it sucks the breath from your lungs, and you lose your grip on your bag and you cry out in the pain you have not yet felt.

And you cry out in a voice so loud it it hurts your throat, to a god you have believed in all your life, in a voice you never used before and to a god you do not know and who no longer can hear you.

And you think of Isaiah 2:4, “And he shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” You had read those words and you had once believed them.

And now you know that the world itself is a sword lifted up and thrust toward your throat. And your hands are tied behind your back like your husband’s were when he was beaten and dragged away and another man who lies dead on the ground beside you.

When nothing else has any meaning. This god or that god, or the rules of war.

What kind of people make rules of war like rules of grammar or poker? How do we need rules about who to kill, and when it is permissible and when it is not? Words without meaning which are ignored. Humanitarian is another of those words.

And then you see the last bus pull away without you. And there is no water and no food and no toilets.

When there is no hope, and the days of the hopeless hope you once had have passed, when you are crowded in amongst the dead and the starving and the dying, in the cold and dark, you will see, only then, what you could not ever have imagined when the world was big and the sun was bright and the air was clear, and war was only a word for a place where others lived and died, and conflicts which were given names and had dates of when they began and when they ended, and numbers of dead and wounded were counted, and crosses were hammered into the thawing ground with the rounded iron backs of shovels that had dug the shallow graves by men too old to fight.

And you will know how it was that men had done this because you saw the grim and vacant disregard in their faces, inches from your own. And know that they they had planned and considered this one option and that other option, and each one had only one intent and that was to kill this many nobodies here and that many nobodies over there as they could. And the greatest sinfulness that we have known and written down in all the holy history books and agreed to since the beginning of time, held no sway with them. That men with no souls had done this. And they did it with hot white hatred.

I know that now, and I know that this war, this new war without an historical name yet, and with no end date to write in books, will have no end for me. I will die in the midst of it.

And I hope for death to come. I need to live and I want to die.

Home Fries

“Miriam, how about scrambled eggs and home fries for dinner. Sound okay?”

“Sure. That’s good.”

“Or would you rather something else? Like pancakes or oatmeal.”

“No, no. That’s really good. Yes, Eggs. Eggs and home fries. Good. Or pancakes … either one would be fine. Thanks for cooking. I’ll make some coffee. Okay?”

“Yes. Regular?”

“Regular. But not too strong, right? It’s almost ten. But, maybe pancakes instead of eggs.”

“Pancakes, good! I saw Kenn at the food pantry yesterday. First time since COVID started. Over two years ago. Hard to believe it’s been so long. He looks the same. He asked about you and the kids. Maybe make decaf, instead.

“Masks? How’s he doing? Could you use the gluten-free flour?”

“Yes. Gluten-free. Nobody was wearing masks and we had to sign in with a vaccination card. He’s doing fine. He looks great. Still working. Same Kenn. Same laugh. Same smile.”

“That’s good. He’s a good guy.”

“Miriam, just thinking, when the time comes, will you let Kenn know of my passing?”

“What? Sure, your passing? But can I wait to call until after we finish dinner?”

“Miriam…”

“…No, no, you’re right, until after your passing would be best. Whenever that might be, of course. Sort of timelier, to wait, you know, more conventional. More expected. More routine.”

“Miriam…”

“Why are you asking me this, anyway? Should I be worried? Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what? Yes, I should be worried? Yes, you have chest pain. Or yes, no. No palpitations? No shortness of breath.”

“Nope. None of the above.”

“Then what made you think of it?”

“I don’t know. I just was thinking about how when you don’t see people for a long time and then you see them, like I saw Kenn yesterday, and it’s a good feeling and then I thought how there are other people you don’t see for some time and you wonder what happened to them and you might want to know that they died so you can give yourself a chance to pause and think of them. Almost like a moment of grieving for them. Almost even as if in that moment they are present to you. Almost like how you would feel if you saw them on the street. That feeling of reacquaintance, of renewing the friendship, and then when they walk away you recall how you had missed seeing them without even knowing that you were missing them. You didn’t actually see them, because they’re gone, but it feelsclose to that feeling. Like they were actually there in front of the bookstore looking in the window where you used to see them. And then they’d come in and say hello. But it’s all in your mind.”

“Or in your heart. Coffee’s done. Should I pour it?”

“In your heart, yes. And the pancakes are ready.”

“That’s a good feeling, right? Oh, god … I have to make another pot of coffee. I can’t drink this. It’s terrible. I was watching you cook, and we were talking, and I started think about dying, you and me, or passing, or whatever, and I must have lost count of the scoops I was putting in.”

“I know. It’s way too strong. Even if it’s decaf.”

“It’s not decaf. I forgot. I used the regular. Maybe I’ll just have tea. But, what brought on this change? In saying ‘passing’ I mean, now? You never liked people saying ‘passing’ before. You thought it was false.”

“I know. I’ll have some tea instead too. I was just thinking it just seems to me that saying ‘passing’ is gentler, more like saying ‘leave-taking’ to me now than it did before.”

“I like it too. I like how it sounds. The sound of ‘leave taking’ too in saying ‘passing.’ It has the feel of temporalness. Maybe I mean temporariness, if that’s the right word. Even though we know it’s not temporary. I remember, though, when you used to say that people who said ‘passing’ were only skirting the issue. Like they were taking the long way around, or the safer way around the subject. ‘They’re afraid to face up to reality of death,’ you would tell me.”

“Now I feel that there’s a kindness about saying, “She passed, or he passed.” I think we can understand what we are saying without including all the heavy, insensitive bluntness. Tempering our language is just out of a consideration for the circumstances.”

“And, certainly, if someone told you that their mother passed, you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, you mean she died?‘ Right?”

“Yes. Right. Of course not. The kitchen smells so good. Doesn’t it? The browned potatoes and onions. The warm pancakes.”

“Maybe when you preferred saying ‘dying’ you were really avoiding feeling about it yourself. Making it seem removed from you, objective, just a fact, so it wouldn’t touch you.”

“Maybe. You’re probably right. Hopefully, as you say, it is more meaningful, and visceral, and emotional than just semantics and I’m learning from it, but nevertheless, at the same time, my fear of the inevitable remains undeterred.”

“Sometimes, I think it’s healthy to recognize reality and then you can ask it to step out of the room for a while. And today?”

“I don’t know. Today? Ukraine. Ted Cruz. The collapse of the East Antarctic Ice shelf. Madeline Albright. The Milky Way expanding. I don’t know. Sometimes, I just think about it all and I feel sad. Sad is tolerable. And then other times, like today, it seems to climb into my lap, with its foul breath, and looks me in the eye and won’t look away.”

“I know, Will. I know. Look at me… Let’s eat.”

While You Were Playing Wordle this Morning

While you were playing Wordle this morning, I made a fresh pot of coffee.

While you were at the kitchen table playing Wordle this morning my sister said she’s having a mammogram and a bone density test in the city today and then she’s going to an exhibit at the Whitney later with her friend Sybil who had the double mastectomy and the chemo and then the reconstruction four years ago, and how, after I had mine, I refused the chemo because we wanted so much to get pregnant.

While you were scribbling letters on the edges of the newspaper, playing Wordle this morning, I made oatmeal for breakfast. The steel cut oats you like. Though I don’t feel I can eat anything at all today.

While you were saying words out loud, playing Wordle this morning, I filled our pill boxes for the week and called in the prescriptions for your mother. She also needs more Depends and Metamucil. The apple spice kind, not the chocolate.

While you were playing Wordle this morning I worked out on the elliptical machine and emptied the dehumidifier into the bucket for watering the plants. And I thought about how much oil costs now and we need to turn down the thermostat again because we can’t afford another fill up before spring, and how we need to call your friend again about solar panels for the roof, though I don’t know how we can pay for it, much less for an electric car.

And, while you were playing Wordle this morning I wrote a check for Sudan and one for the Pine Street Inn. Twenty-five for each. And I thought about how Paul Farmer just died. And how he was such a good person. At least I think he was. He did good work. I’m sorry we lost him.

And then, while you were playing Wordle this morning I folded the laundry and poured the last of the coffee in your cup and you smiled at me with your “this is a hard one” frown-smile.

And your mother said your father went to say morning prayers with his friend whose mother, in Kharkiv, is now somewhere near the border with Poland. She said she is a refugee in her own country, and I thought that if we ever had another child, I would name her Oksana.

I imagined that since I was born, a billion stars had been formed in the universe, and a billion more had died, and it will take a million light years before anyone will know that they had come and gone, and I decided that I want to have a green burial. I don’t want a big expensive coffin. Don’t let anyone talk you into it. And I don’t want to be burned in an oven. And I don’t want whatever that fluid is they pump bodies with, and I don’t want someone putting makeup on me and combing my hair and I don’t want people all staring at me and telling you how peaceful I look, and I don’t want to be dressed in any of my clothes. And no bra or panties, and no shoes. Nothing. That is ridiculous. Just wrap me in muslin and put me in the ground.

While you were playing Wordle this morning, I ordered Cloud Cuckoo Land and the new Amor Towles book from the library. I’m eighty-eighth on the list for one and thirty-fourth on the other. I can wait, and by then half a billion pounds of Greenland ice will have melted. Maybe more.

And I started to think about me being a skeleton one day and that’s the only thing that gives me any peace about dying. Being a skeleton that someone in five hundred years or a thousand will dig up and brush the dirt off my bones and put them in a box like they are a gift, and they will know that I was a woman and I had two children and I broke my wrist when I was nine and I didn’t eat any meat or dairy. Thinking that makes me feel good.

And, while you were playing Wordle this morning, I brushed my teeth and when I rinsed my mouth out and saw my reflection in the mirror, I felt suddenly chilled to think of a million women like me with a million children like ours, leaving their homes and everything they own, running from vacuum bombs over streets like ours. And leaving behind them husbands and brothers and sons, and maybe their fathers, who will be holding rifles given to them even though they had never picked up a gun in their whole lives before, and then they will stand in the snow in the doorway of the bakery shop where only last week they had bought a loaf of bread, waiting to shoot at Russian tanks filled with boys and maybe some girls looking through view finders at them in the crosshairs and each of them ready to kill one another, dead, dead, dead.

And, while you were playing Wordle this morning, I gathered up recycling for the transfer station though I don’t believe for a minute that any of it really gets recycled. And even if I’m wrong, I wonder what good it will do if the steel mills and the crypto currency people don’t do recycling and Dow Chemical keeps pumping out plastic beach chairs.

While you were playing Wordle this morning, I thought about how sad I feel even though we have heat and food to eat and water to drink and I have never lost a child, and no one has shot at my son in his car, and no one has driven me from my home, or grabbed me from behind and pushed me to the ground and raped me, or bombed the street I lived on, or anything so horrific as that.

And, while I was watching you work on the Wordle puzzle this morning, I felt how much I love you and the children and how all of life is so precious to me and how fortunate we are, and how it seems that our life and the lives of so many others can mean so much but at the same time mean nothing more to some men than a handful of melting snow.

And so, while you were playing Wordle this morning, I sat on the toilet, and I cried for all of that, and for things I didn’t know I was crying about, and I cried and I cried, and I felt as though I would never ever stop crying.

Breaking the Judy Blues Eyes Rule

Nathan M. flew from Logan to West Palm Beach. He had taken a few days off from work. His son, the oldest one, picked him up at the airport, and they talked, mostly about the weather in Boston, their jobs, and the Mets on the car ride up to St. Lucie. It was spring training season and it felt like late July in the Back Bay.

 Nathan asked his son if he could turn up the car radio. Billy Joel. Piano Man.

His son always had Billy Joel on whenever Nathan got in his truck. He wondered whether his son really liked Billy Joel or if he only played it because they used to listen to him, volume turned high, when the two of them lived together. That was in the years after his mother and Nathan had split and his son moved back home after college. Either way, it made him happy. He could feel his shoulders relax.

“He says, ‘Son can you play me a memory?

I’m not really sure how it goes

But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete

When I wore a younger man’s clothes.’”

His son had started calling Nathan pretty regularly after his mother had been diagnosed with ALS. This was after he’d finished grad school, gotten married to a young woman from Mississippi, and they moved to Florida to be near to his mother.

Nathan and Helen, the boy’s mother, had three children and all three had moved to Florida to be near her.

Nathan now had two young children with his new wife. They lived in Boston, close to where her family lived.

He’d flown down when his son called to say that Helen was dying, asking if he wanted to come see her for the last time.

Each of his children and their partners were there. They were all in her spare bedroom with the hospital bed and medical equipment. No one spoke when he walked in. They looked at him and smiled. He and Helen had had a troubled past.

Each of them took turns sitting briefly in a chair by Helen’s bed. The IV drip had been unplugged, though the line with the morphine pump was still clicking on and off. Nathan sat by the bed once, maybe twice, for a few minutes each time, hoping and not hoping she would open her eyes and see him there. A thin blanket covered her body. Her face was sharp and gaunt.

He and Helen had married in August of sixty-six. It was hot and he’d worn a suit he’d rented.

Nathan had kept one picture of her. The first one he’d ever taken of her. On one of the first days they’d spent together. The only one he had of her by herself—not with friends or in a crowd of tourists wearing plaid and untucked shirts in front of some famous monument or around a table with smiling people with raised glasses leaning in towards one another though they’d only just met one another.

In this photo she’s standing beside his car. In three-quarter profile, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Her hand shading the sun from her eyes. In a light-colored summer dress. The photo was from September ’65. A little less than a year before they were married.

After Nathan had been there for a while, the hospice nurse had said, “Sometimes, right near the end, you see, one or the other of you might consider leaving the room, to ease the passing.”

She’d said it to all of them, but he was the only one who then left.

He went out for a walk. Passing pastel condos like hers. Neat lawns. Palm trees. Swept driveways. Clean white cars with Michigan and new Sunshine State plates. Nobody to be seen in the yards. No sounds other than those of yelping poodles behind drawn curtains and trucks on the interstate.

He was not in the room when she died.

In the ten months before he and Helen were married, they had taken short, uncomplicated trips. Sampling large pizzas with garlic and onion in places they’d never been before, sharing a Coke with no ice. Eating the whole pie right there in the booth, wiping the grease off their chins and fingers, laughing, giving half-serious points for crust, chew, sauce, cheese, and its New York-style foldability, compared with the others they’d eaten. Tony and Tina’s on Arthur Avenue, Joe’s on Carmine Street, Pasty’s on 56th Street. The Famous and not so Famous Original Rays.

Driving around with the windows open playing the Zombies and Stones tapes. Cramming for organic chemistry exams together: The sequence of steps in the hydrohalogenation reaction of an asymmetric alkene. The Bischler-Napieralski reaction. He wanted badly to go to medical school. She wasn’t interested in any more school and wanted to get a job.

So, instead, they got married.

 Before that, in June or July, Nathan told his older brother that he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go through with it. No way. He was twenty-one. Scared. Rushed. Not at all what he wanted. His brother said if that was a legit reason for not getting married, nobody would do it. “You need a better excuse than that,” he said. If that was his only reason, it wasn’t good enough.

It was during that part of the sixties that still wore the clothes of the fifties. Pre-Woodstock. Pre-sexual freedom. Pre-EST. Pre-consciousness-raising. The pre-let’s-think-about-this-and-see-the-world-for-a-while-before-we-just-rush-into-something-stupid part of the sixties.

His brother said their mother would throw a shit fit if he backed out. And so, he didn’t. They moved into an apartment together. Bought an Ethan Allen couch and a rocking chair. They nailed pictures up on the walls and kept their socks and underwear in separate dressers.

Neither of them knew anything about marriage, at least not good ones. They followed a hand-me-down script they were given, with nothing more than that to go on. Nothing that might help them avert twenty years of quiet unhappiness, depression, anxiety, resentment, isolation, loose and muddled affairs, and weariness. No real, deep, understanding of love to guide them.

Both wanting, expecting, to love and to be loved. And when they didn’t know how to make that happen and didn’t see a way out, they both kept stepping deeper into a muddy river which only got wider the further they got in.

They were little more than adolescents made up to look like adults, with three children and the old thin-at-the-elbows neuroses their parents had given to them. They were no good together, and each was too afraid to say it.

They split. They found they were so much better apart. Happier. It just took so long for that to happen.

She died that afternoon while he was out walking.

Then, as she lay, so recently alive, so recently herself, all of that past came welling up in him.

And so, he cried. For her. And for himself. For their shared and separate sadness before they split. For the joy they had missed when they were together.

On the flight back up to Logan, looking down at the blue, blue ocean, he listened to the circling lyrics of songs he once knew by heart and only now remembered as fragments on repeat in his brain. Words and melodies worn deeply into the grooves of his synapses.

Only then, belatedly, did he see that he had broken the Judy Blue Eye’s Rule.

He had stood by her bed. Taken his turn in the chair beside her. And, even then, at that moment, when she had so little time left, he had not seen her as who she was. Only who she had been … and only in relation to himself. As he had done in the past, seeing her only through his too-young-to-see-clearly eyes.

Even then as she was near to breathing her last human breath, his vision of her was still clouded by the remnants of who she had seemed to be in the past. Not the woman she was. The one who she always had been, and he could not see. CSN. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

“Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now

I am not dreaming

I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are…”

Of Nietzsche, Vonnegut, and Pastrami at Katz’s Lower East Side

“Hi, are you Carmella?”

“Yes. Miriam?”

“Yes. I’m so glad you came.”

“Thanks for saving me a seat. It’s crazy in here. I can’t believe it’s so packed at ten o’clock at night.”

“Sit. Please. Give me your ticket and I’ll order for both of us.”

“I don’t know what I want yet.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get pastrami on rye with mustard and you’ll love it. I promise. I’ll be right back.”

On returning to their seats with their tray, Miriam said, “Sorry it took so long. It’s part of the schtick here. Look at this sandwich. I thought we’d share one?”

“Oh, my God, yes, it looks incredible!”

“Let’s eat.”

“Forgive me,” Carmella says, chewing, “I looked at the book on your chair. You’re reading Nietzsche. What do you think? The ‘eternal return’ idea. You think he had it right? Vonnegut wrote something about that too.”

“I’ve never read Vonnegut, but maybe I should. I think Nietzsche had it right, mostly. About what he called ‘the eternal recurrence.’ The cosmology. It’s much more complicated now. But philosophically, I’m not so sure where he stood.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sometimes he seems certain, even challenging the reader about the idea. At others, he seems as if he’s challenging his own thinking. But the cosmological part, based on astrophysical calculations, was the right idea.”

“But he didn’t know any of the mathmatical stuff, did he?”

“No. Nor that the universe, the multiverse, is recursive and nonlinear in spacetime, without beginning or end. Eternal in that respect. Billions of years of expansion, loss of momentum, and then gravity and entropy drawing all matter and energy back to a single massive point of dense black energy. Only to explode outward with an equal dark energetic repulsion like it is now.

“But he believed that the universe was cyclic, as others had years before him. Did you get pickles?”

“Yes, half-sour. And yes, no physical confirmation of cycling, like we have now. An infinite-seeming series of cycling. A kind of Bang, Bang, Bang, rather than one Big Bang. But, of course, the whole issue of cosmology is well beyond the limits of human existence, if not the limits of human thought. I mean what Nietzsche and others were really concerned about was what is the nature of human existence and thought. Right?”

“And God.”

“Yes. And God. Philosophically, he has some cosmological support about the absence of God. We think that the entire energy content of the universe, as we see it, is a closed system. There are no leaks through which energy can either be added or lost. More mustard?”

“Sure. But how does that relate to God?”

“In a closed system, there are no external forces, or energy, outside that can enter or leave. So, no motive, creative force setting it all in motion. So, as Nietzsche proposed, no god that created the universe.”

“I’ve never tasted rye bread so good. But what if there was, or is, a god force, which set it in motion and walked away. Or better yet, one within the universe. And we can’t see it. Some unidentified, hidden, immeasurable force escaping calculation in the physical mathematical models we have.”

“Some unaccounted-for glitch in the theory or the measurements of energy in the universe?”

“Yes. Do you want some of mine? One cosmic-repulsive-attractive-cohesive energy with the potential to form matter?”

“No thanks. We just don’t know. In our tiny inconsequential moment of spacetime, no matter how many infinite iterations of the cycle, assuming that in each cycle both life and humans will be formed, we’ll never know.”  

“And, if they don’t?”

“You mean one and done? Then what he thinks matters only if it helps us understand anything more of what makes us human and what matters in our lives. But, anyway, why should what he thinks matter anymore than me or you?”

“Now you’re sounding like Vonnegut.”

“Why?”

“Because there are no absolutes. It’s all immaterial. It’s all just a story. And what we know is obviously only subjective and transitory. All we have is what we think and how we act.”

“Exactly. But isn’t that the central flaw in human thought and philosophy. That any one person’s thought can define what morality and happiness might be? The best we might get from Nietzsche or anyone, no matter how well-informed or well-intentioned, is a thought that we might consider. And, if that thought helps you find happiness as part of a good life, then that thought may be good. No more than that.”

“I don’t know if Nietzsche was proposing a universal happiness force. He almost certainly was not proposing one derived from the energetic core of the universe.

“Surely not. As if there was, in a teleological sense, a purpose to life. A predetermined achievable eternal goal of life. A cycle of eternal personal human existence in which we live and die and live again, ensuring that time and again, like a great Mandala, humans, we personally, would experience a rebirth to follow at some time, in the eternity of time, to live again and, as some believe, a new life, following this one, in which we’ll be born into a happier, more fulfilled, more moral, being. You’ve got some schmutz on your chin. No, no. There. Yes, you got it”

“Thanks. That would mean that there’d be a progression of increasingly happier states. And each generation of human beings would consist of people born happier and more fulfilled. But, so many people alive today live lives of hardship and little or no hope for anything different, just as so many have, generation after generation. If the universe were to be so programmed, why are humans still born into a life of sadness or unendurable hardship, given the thousands and thousands of generations of people born since they first appeared on the earth?”

“So maybe Nietzsche really proposed the concept of eternal return, as analogous to a life in heaven as a repetition of the life we have lived on earth, but only the good parts.”

“Yes, and would that not simply satisfy the belief we all have that the good moments of our life are worth remembering and make life worth living? And for those who believe that there is a god and an afterlife, it would somehow make the present life worth living?”

“So why do we look to philosophers to make up theories that no one really pays any attention to?”

“Because philosophers are filled with their own issues they’re trying to work out. And they have this sense growing out of their privileged position in life. The sense that they have earned it. Earned a better life by their good works or their good education, their charity, or their fortunes, or their piety. The feeling, among some, that they are fundamentally better than others.”

“For those, Nietzsche’s claim that God does not exist has no relevance. Because they’re übermensches, supermen, who see themselves as transcendent. Who regale in the trappings of a good life because it is what they have earned, or bought. It’s a comforting and rewarding philosophy for them.”

“You can be an übermensch and not believe in an afterlife or in eternal return. Isn’t that really what Nietzsche was saying? That to strive for a moral life is a goal in itself. The definition, really of the good life? Is that not what Vonnegut was saying, too? Be the best, freest person you can be?”

“Yes. I think, in the end, that is what Nietzsche might have believed. That when he posited the concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ it was really a ploy, a way to question pre-determination, a way to understand the meaning of free will, and that in life we ought to live the one best life. That to believe in a life after this life, as a second and third and fourth chance at a good life, ad infinitum, was not metaphysically tenable. That’s why he wrote that recurring life would, contrary to some other philosophies of reincarnation, be repetitions of the same hard life over and over again and why he settled on the concept of the Übermensch, not as an inherently superior being, but as one person, male or female, who strives to live the best, and in his view, the most moral life.”

“Brava. These are the very same positions that Vonnegut makes in his Tralfamadorian conception of time, which echoes Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence precisely. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to read Nietzsche like you do. I think Vonnegut is enough of a philosophical story for me.”

“Oh, my God. Look at this. It’s almost eleven. They’re going to close. I haven’t eaten even half of my half sandwich.”

“Let’s ask for wrappers for them. This has been delicious and fantastic, Carmella. We have to do this again.”

“Next Thursday? Vonnegut? The Sirens of Titan? At Angelica’s up on 187th?”

“Great. At ten again?”

“Ten, again!”

Carmella raised her half-full glass of Dr. Brown’s Celray-tonic. “Here’s to Tralfamadore and the Chrono-synclastic Infundibulum!”

 “What?”

“Read, and thus shall ye be enlightened.”

Hold Close Your Family

Greer came home from Ithaca for Thanksgiving. We all had gathered at Celia and Dave’s on the Thursday. The aunts, uncles, cousins. Celia cooked. She cooked every year.

We have a large family. Complicated. Blended in a way different from the way we speak about some families nowadays. More complicated. Maybe not. Though cousins marrying cousins seems strange to some. Not in a good way, I think. Celia is my cousin. And she married Dave, my younger brother. Our grandparents were cousins. I think that’s an old country thing, from when families were large and communities were small and tight. Insular, protective, with good reason.

 “Hold close your family, Gert,” my mother always told me. “We do that. We women do that.”

I think of Celia and me. Our mothers. Our Aunts. Our daughters. “We are the stitching that holds the sweater together,” my mother would say.

Greer didn’t feel well. He didn’t look good, but we all told him he looked great. He had grown a beard at college. Dave said it was an affront to the flag, the country, the troops. It was 1969. We passed Dave the cranberry sauce.

Greer ate very little and took a nap before going out to see some friends. Celia made him see the doctor the next day. It was mono. Fatigue, swollen lymph glands, fever. He wasn’t hungry. Just tired. Pain in all his bones.

I will say this before I say any more, just to get it out. On the Mother’s Day after that Thanksgiving, just before dawn, my nephew, Greer, died. Or, he ‘passed’ as my older brother, Max, the writer, prefers to say. He believes died is too harsh a word. Too organic sounding, he says. He lives in Toronto. We hardly ever see him. He doesn’t do Thanksgivings.

Greer went back to school on the Monday after the vacation. The symptoms persisted, then worsened. He went to the infirmary. The doctor there ordered blood work and called Sloane Kettering where she had a colleague. Then she called home and spoke to Celia.

Celia was making dinner for Dave. When she heard the doctor’s voice, she sat down in the chair by the telephone table in the hall, next to the cabinet with the bottle of J&B and a shot glass Dave would drink from when he got home from work.

When she heard the doctor say she was from the college, she began to sob. She said, “No.” Kept saying no, listening to only some of what the woman was saying. She heard “Kettering,” though.

She called me, still crying, grasping for breath, as she told me. It sounded bad. I said maybe it wouldn’t be, that he’d get the best care there, whatever it is.

“Yes,” she agreed.

I sometimes imagined Celia and myself growing old and wrinkled together, living in a two-bedroom condo in Florida, on a cul-de-sac with palm trees, like our mothers did, with a broad screened-in veranda, and baby alligators in the lake we can see from our backyard.

Greer died before the sun came up. When only the blue-gray light from the east came in through the window in his room.

Kettering was a grim place. The walls were painted with grime and sadness. There was nothing there that looked anything like hopeful. If we saw hope one day, the next day it was quickly dashed against the walls, the windows, and the floors.

We bought him a radio for the table beside his bed. Friends sent letters and cards to him. Wished him well.

The treatment was experimental. Alkaloids made from plants. Periwinkles and crocuses. Colchicine and vincristine. There was nothing else. Experimental sounded promising. We trusted them. We needed to. We knew nothing. They knew everything.

He lay in a bed in a room paid for by a government grant. It had one window which looked out on First Avenue.

I read that Paul Ehrlich, in the early 1900’s, studied experimental treatments for cancer, using the alkylating agents. They say he had a sign over the door to his lab, “Give up all hope, oh ye who enter.”

The drugs killed his cells. Any cells that divided fast. The cancer cells, his bone marrow, skin, hair, mucous membranes. His body just stopped making new cells. Red and white blood cells, platelets. His body stopped growing, stopped healing itself.

He was nauseous all the time. They gave him peppermint drops for it. They gave him antibiotics and platelets to replace the ones that the drugs had killed. But the cancerous cells spread.

We stayed with him as much as we could. Taking turns sitting by his bed, going out for coffee or a cigarette. Standing by the window in his room looking out at the traffic. Watching the lights on the corner of Sixty-eighth. On nights when it rained, the lights spread out in streams on the dark, wet streets.

For weeks, Celia sat at the end of the hall by the radiator. Her arms folded across her chest or wrapped around herself. She looked weary. The hallway looked weary. She came to his room, several times during each hour, standing by the door, taking the measure of his condition. Taking the measure of what she could endure. She’d then turn away, back into the hall, or she’d come in and touch his hand or his cheek, feel his forehead, her own headed bowed.

“Would you like to sit in the chair?” Sometimes she did.

“Are you alright?” I asked her once. She looked at me. That was foolish of me to say.

Each night we drove home on the highway along the East River, crossing into the Bronx and up home, past the racetrack. We didn’t talk. I drove and she looked out the window on her side. We kept the radio off. There was so much to think about. Greer, of course. And other things, too. It seemed like everything was falling apart. Russia, missiles, Cuba, the bomb. Kennedy and his brother, King, Vietnam, riots in the streets. There was so little for us to hold on to. We felt powerless. We were powerless.

“Oh, Gert,” she’d say to me. Not looking at me. Speaking to the window. Watching the boats on the river.

There were no words to be said. Only grief. As when my own son, the year before, had been hit and killed by a driver as he knelt on the side of the road fixing a flat tire in the dark. She’d suffered with me in my own grief then. Too much to bear. Too much to bear alone.

We’d put our things down on kitchen counter and Dave would ask how he looked today, what did the doctors say, how was he feeling? I’d take Nico out for a walk and let the two of them talk. I don’t know what they said. I left them alone. Then I’d go home and to work in the morning and pick Celia up the next afternoon.

One evening, as we got ready to leave, the nurse, a woman in her fifties, I thought, told us that his fever was very high and that maybe we should stay. We watched as they fitted an ice pack as big as a mattress, under him, to bring the fever down.

She said, “If he makes it until dawn, he’ll be okay.”

“If?”

In the first gray light of day came through the window, when the nurse came in, she called out for the doctor, we woke in our chairs. He had not made it. It would never ever be okay. He had died there while we slept in chairs by his bed.

We drove home. The two of us.

And when she saw Dave standing, waiting for us in the kitchen, “We’ve lost our boy,” she said, and held on tight to him.

A Sudden Change in the Weather at Weeping Rock

Harris and Cortina ate pancakes with butter and syrup at a table near the door of the park’s visitor center, a short walk from the trailhead. It had rained. Their clothing was soaked through. Their boots were filled with mud. They were bedraggled. Shaken.

Men and women in expensive looking hiking gear and sleek backpacks came through the door. Their sunglasses set back atop their heads, they looked around, and smiled at the couple eating pancakes, in a way as if the two were unfamiliar guests at a wedding party who no one wanted to sit with.

Harris poured syrup over the cakes. It trickled down over the round edges.

Cortina did not look up from her plate. Her hair dripped.

They both knew it was over between them.

Harris poured himself second cup of coffee and lifted the pot toward her. She shook her head.

He put the pot down and she picked it up and poured a cup for herself.

They’d made love the night before, in Bullhead, in the back bedroom of her mother’s doublewide, and they’d slept late. They had to hurry, then, to start the drive up to Zion. Neither of them liked to feel pressured.

Cortina’s mother worked at a casino in Laughlin, on the Nevada side of the Colorado River.

The day before, she had taken them to the casino for breakfast in the employees’ cafeteria and then they swam in the river. The flood gates at Lake Mead were open and they floated down river a few miles in the swift, brown current and then walked back up along the road to Harrah’s and jumped back in again.

By the time they reached the Weeping Rock trail head, it was almost noon. It was three hours up over the East Rim into Hidden Canyon and another three down.

Cortina had taken the trail once before. It was narrow. Two yards wide at its widest. Switchbacks crisscrossed the steep face of the mountain.

Cortina led. Single file. She called back to Harris the names of every tree and rock formation they passed. Kaibab limestone. Fremont Cottonwoods. Quaking Aspen. Utah juniper. Bristlecone pine. Navajo sandstone.

He followed in her steps as best he could.

In the canyon above the rim, protected from the wind, they drank the last of the water she had packed.

Harris, his legs covered in fine red ancestral dust, saw himself as a free young man who’d once lived in the quiet sacredness of the canyons, on the plateaus, and down along the creeks in the valleys. He felt they begged to be worshipped.

When the sun traversed the rim, Cortina said they needed to head back down. The way they’d come up. He thought there must have been another, easier, trail down.  

They’d been together for about a year. They talked books. Shared pizzas and salads. They once took a weekend trip to Block Island, rode rented bikes, and bought rolls at a roadside bakery. They were both reading Blindness then. She liked Saramago’s writing more than Harris did.

She had two children. Teens. They lived with her and spoke badly about their father’s new wife and with whom they spent weekends before she became pregnant, after which they felt they were no longer welcome.

He found them hard to be around. Cortina knew that. She said he would get used to them over time. That they meant well, though Harris doubted that.

Down from the rim, they walked in shade. The rockface on one side, and nothingness on the other. Far below, cars were leaving the park.

Harris’s boots slipped on the downward slope a few times, and Cortina told him to keep a safer distance behind her.

There had been a magnetic rush between them when they’d met. An outsized hunger for each other.

She had a literary mind. She knew things he did not, making references to authors and books he’d not read. She hated Hemingway. He suspected it was the man’s matter-of-fact unfaithfulness, rather than his writing, that she disliked. She abhorred Roth. He sensed a peremptory rebuke which he took personally.

Further down, the wind picked up. An updraft. The trail was shadowed by tall darkening clouds.

Cortina unstrapped her backpack and removed a poncho which she put on. She had not packed one for him. He had not thought to bring one. It snapped in the wind.

One crack of thunder. Rain began.

Pebbles skipped down the mountain face from above them. They walked down a few yards, no more than ten or fifteen, looking for some shelter. There was none.

Larger stones fell with the sheeting rain and, in moments, rocks the size of coconuts tumbled down. Water sluiced around their feet. Harris felt he could not breathe.

She screamed at him. “Turn around, go back up!”

Boulders the size of steamer trunks clattered and bounced around them. He shuddered in horror as each one passed.

“Up? Why up?” he said.

“Just listen to me, damn it, we have to find some cover.”

“Where?”

“Up there,” she said.

She pointed to an outcropping of rock they had passed. He did as she said.

“Get down! Make room for me and don’t move!”

Whole sections of the rock wall split off and slid down the mountainside, tumbling out and hitting the side again lower down, some landing on the switchbacks and others bringing down trees and shattering at the foot of the mountain.

Harris’s breath came in short, panicked gulps. He forced himself back against the rock. The nearness of death, the reality and imminence of it. At any moment they could be swept out into the nothingness.

They waited only for the next moment to come and to pass.

When the rain finally stopped, the sky cleared and brightened, waterfalls broke out of crevices in the rockface.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s go down now.”

He flew home to New York alone. She drove the rental back to Kingman.

He saw her once again. A chance meeting on one of the avenues uptown near the Met.

She had let her hair grow out to a soft and appealing shade of gray. It was cold, and they spoke for only a few minutes before she turned and took the arm of the man she had been walking with.

Hannah and Murray Discuss the Future

“Ma, where’s Murray?”

“Out with Zeus.”

“He names a dog Zeus and he gets away with it? Isn’t that like sacrilegious, or illegal or something?”

“Hannah dear, it’s only sacrilegious if you first make a law against it. Like, ‘thou shalt not covet’ or ‘thou shalt not name a dog after a major- or minor-, or even half-god of the universe’, for example.”

“And could I do that?”

“Maybe, ask your father.”

“But what if I make a law like that and someone breaks it?”

“Well, Hannah, I guess it might depend upon several things like, who breaks it, or if only one breaks it, or if a whole lot of them break it, or if they break it by only thinking about it, or planning to do it, or doing it only once, or if they do it a lot while no one is watching, or if they do it and then apologize after but nobody believes their apology, or if…”

“Ok, ma, thanks, I’ll ask Dad.”

“That’s good dear. He’ll appreciate that since…”

“Dad, Ma said I should talk to you. It’s about Murray.”

“Have you spoken with Murray about the matter first?”

“Not exactly, sort of, but not in those exact same words.”

“Well, dear, it’s disrespectful if you go over your brother’s head without speaking with him first, and so I suggest that you give some thought to possibly…”

“My god, no wonder nothing ever gets done around here anymore.”

“What was that dear?”

“Nothing, Dad.”

“So, Murray, Dad said I should talk to you about something super really important.”

“Did you leave a note in my in-box?”

“I tried, but it was full and not accepting any more messages, not since the BCE changed to AD.

“Am I detecting a note of hostility and an incipient challenge to the established proto…”

“Cut the crap, Murray, I’m you your sister. I need you to get in touch with Moses.

“Unfortunately, Hadassah…”

“Hannah.”

“Unfortunately, Hannah, Moses passed on some time ago.”

“Too bad. He was your front man, your mouthpiece, your homey with the commonfolk. And then you just drop him off at the edge of the Jordan like a day-old knish? Who’d you get to replace him.”

“Ah, good question. I’m still interviewing. I’ve had so little time to… I wish I had made better use of his skills, sending him off into the desert was just a holding action until I…”

 “You’re shitting me, right?”

“I’ve had a few good prospects but, you know how it is with…”

“I cannot goddamn believe this. You’re telling me that you you’re okay with things down there with the floods and fires, polar ice melting, a million species of plants and animals you made yourself all those zillions of years ago, gone (and don’t tell me it was only six days because we both know that’s a crock because of the mutability of spacetime) and you do nothing? Nada?”

“Nada?”

“Murray, are you even paying any attention? It’s not like it was just an unpaid internship with Moses. He traipsed through the wilderness for forty years to find the promised land and when they got there you told him you’d changed your mind, and said ‘no dice folks’, go back down the mountain and walk around for another 38 years and then attack the Amorites and, no worries, you just massacre them and take their land. Are you kidding me? Then you did the same with the Reubinites, the Gadites, Manassites, the meteorites and stalactites and stalagmites, the Hittites and the Bagelbites, and the others.”

“You’re mocking me.”

“And you sent them off smiting and wandering, meanwhile saying don’t worship the stars and the moon and the earth and the water but the should obey you about what they should eat and how many prayers to say how many times a day, and don’t eat anything non-kosher. When soon there’ll be no more shrimp or pigs anyway, Murray. I hope you took pictures of all the mountains and valleys and islands, giraffes, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and Euterpe precatoria palms, because you can say ‘sayonara baby’ to it all unless you get off your skinny-ass butt and do something. Maybe you should have just let them go on worshiping the sky and the trees and the water in the first place.

“Look, bro, you signed up for ‘eternal.’ No one told you to say that. Moses kept calling you ‘the Eternal.’ He didn’t call you the ‘maybe-sometimes-guy’, or the ‘just-for-a-little-while-guy.’ They counted on you. People believed that shit. Have you looked at your firmament, by the way? Filled with satellites and pieces of satellites, used rocket parts, methane, microplastics, mylar balloons, and dead insects.

“You wanted a monopoly. ‘Have no gods before me.’ You said that. And with me and Myron here, and all the rest of us, Artemis, Aphrodite, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, Buddha, and Gaia, … sure, we had our problems but nothing like what’s going on now. At least we answered the phone. But with you, who does anyone get when they call customer service?

“Face it, Murray, Deuteronomy may really have been the last chapter for you.”

“Thank you, Hannah. I get it. I don’t need your help if that’s what this is supposed to be. I’m not interested. I just figured I’d get them started and then, you know, let free will take them the rest of the way, right? That was the whole point with the snake and the apple.”

“But Murray, look where that got them. I mean after they ate the apple and put clothes on, you could have dropped some hints about the black plague or Styrofoam, or anything with the word ‘atomic’ in it, or don’t build houses downhill from Vesuvius, or avoid anyone with Stalin as a last name, or don’t dig down further than say ten cubits, and stay away from gun powder, bat caves, and people who won’t wear a mask, for example.”

“So, what should I do now?”

“You need a new Moses type, Murray. One with creds. Experience. Charisma. I’ll set you up, man. Word! I can get you touch with this guy named LeBron.”

Malachi and His Mother: The Aftermath of the Altshul Incident

“Mel Rothstein called me this morning. He had such tight anger in his voice. Like he was trying to stuff it back down. Showing me how in-control he was.”

Malachi was sitting across from his mother at the kitchen table. She had spilled some sugar as she was adding more of it to her coffee. She pushed the crystals around on the slick tablecloth with her finger as she spoke.

“What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘How could you?’ He said I had fomented an insurrection. An armed insurrection. At the temple. The ‘temple’ he called it. He said I had ruined the reputation of the whole congregation that he had worked so hard to make and that tweets or posts or whatever they call them had been posted across the internet. Pictures of me. Rage on my face. Leading a mob of radical Jews against the police. Calling them Nazis. Threatening them.”

“I saw the pictures.”

“He said that he expected more from me, which I know is a lie because he has never expected anything from me or any other woman beyond dull, mute, subservience and a look of thankful awe.”

She presses her finger into the mound of sugar she had created and picks up what has stuck to the finger into her mouth. Her lips curl, her chin wrinkling. She begins to cry. Malachi reaches across the table to toward her.

“I feel so terrible,” she says “I’m glad your father wasn’t there. I don’t know what he would have done.”

“Ma, I feel so bad for you. I know you meant well. In the most genuine, human sense, you saw a danger and you wanted to save everyone. You weren’t crying wolf, or ‘fire’ in a theater. You thought those cops were terrorists intent on shooting everyone in the room. The whole congregation was sitting like obedient sheep waiting for the doors to open and the shooting to start.”

“That’s what Rothstein called me. A terrorist. Worse than a terrorist, he said. He said I should be ashamed of myself for risking everyone’s lives for my own neurotic mishegas. He said I needed to get help.”

“Rothstein, ran out himself. He ran out without looking back, without offering to help anyone. He burst through the side door. He knocked down the officer there. He ran out of the building the second he heard you scream ‘get out!’ It’s only now that he feels embarrassed. He shouldn’t feel embarrassed. He did the right thing. You did the right thing. They had guns. They were acting like real active shooters. They meant to scare the shit out of you. Out of everyone. And, I may be wrong, but I think they got some sort of charge out of scaring the shit out a bunch of cornered Jews.’’

“Rothstein. I never liked him. But that is totally separate, Malachi. For the first time in my life, I feared for my own mortality. Not in the philosophical sense. Not just in conversation over cocktails. Not in that casual, intellectual, sense of ‘let’s all talk about death’ in some abstract, manageable, way. But in the real gripping fear of death in that very moment. Certain that you’d be shot and killed. Ripped through with bullets, and that my body, me, my mind, my thoughts, my very self, would be lost. Gone. Lost to consciousness. Lost to all reality, to all eternity. It is a fear unlike any other human feeling. That instant awareness of imminent death.”

“I can only begin to imagine how you felt, ma. When I was twelve or thirteen, at night, in bed, if I would think of the vastness of the universe or infinity. The blankness. The unending black void. I could feel my body exploding with fear. The fear of nothingness.”

“I don’t remember that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to. I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night like I needed to escape my thoughts as though they were a physical being. As if death and nothingness were physical beings. Even though the total lack of physicality of them are really what is the most incomprehensible and frightening of all. I needed to get out. Just like you did. I left my room and I went to your bedroom door. It was closed and I didn’t want to knock. I didn’t.”

“You should have, Malachi, that’s what parents are for.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to wake you. It’s that I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“Frighten me?”

“I thought talking to you about death with you older, closer to death, that it would bring up those morbid fears for you. So, I just sat there until I went back to bed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s when I started saying a prayer at night.”

“What kind of prayer? I never taught you prayers.”

“The one with, ‘Our father who art in heaven.’ The one with ‘give us our daily bread’ and ‘the valley of death’. ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ I didn’t know if it was a real prayer. It just made me feel better to say those things. And I’d say bless my mother and father and list of all the people who I wanted to protect, and say them in exactly the right order or I’d have to start all over again to say it right, no matter how many times. And then there was one night, when I was going to bed and I’d always say ‘good night’ and ‘see you in the morgen’ like ‘guten morgen’, but instead I said see you in the morgue.’ And my god, I apologized a hundred times and then I cried and cried and all I could think of was that what I said would really happen and that you’d die because I said that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, ma. And don’t be sorry for doing what you thought was right and good, no matter how it turned out. And forget about Rothstein. He’s not thinking of you, only himself.”

They look at one another. Eye to eye.

“My coffee is cold and I spilled sugar all over the table. Sit, I’ll make us fresh. And let’s talk about something else.”

“Critical Race Theory?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. You should hear what your aunt Frieda has to say about that. Like she might know what it means.”