Go as a River

For a long while, life seems to meander like a lazy river with wide twists and turns. Fish congregate under rocks and frogs fritter away languid afternoons sampling the insect offerings. The seasons follow one another in their natural order, jack-in-the-box Junes bursting out all over, autumns now rolling in after summer, decorating the waters with Klimt-like golden droplets. Boys grow into men and move away to sail their own boats. Birthdays and Thanksgivings arrive out of the future and recede into the past. Then one day, geese can be heard flying overhead squawking their warning. Winter is coming. The ice time is almost upon us and the river is narrowing. Down aways, there are rapids and spiky outcroppings. How many miles till this river, like all rivers, empties into the sea? What will it be like to taste the ocean’s salty tears? There’s no knowing. Only a desire not to get swamped or bogged down, to keep following the curvature of the shore wherever it’s going, picking up twigs and acorns and feathers as I go.

I grew up near the imposing Hudson, south of the George Washington Bridge. Riding home from college on the West Side Highway in the back seat of someone’s two-tone Chevy, you knew you were almost home when you passed the Spry sign on the Jersey side. I had a friend who had a panic attack every time he saw the Spry sign. Maybe he was repelled by the thought of canned grease. Maybe he didn’t want to go home. We were young and unsettled, looking for action. We had no idea that the river was a living thing. Now, my home is near the Housatonic, a more modest waterway in the woodlands of western Massachusetts. I have my own passing acquaintance with the Housatonic. I see that the river has many moods. Different temperatures, water levels, rates of flow, plant and animal habitats, pollutants. Sometimes, it’s high and rushes past like people grabbing lunch on the run in midtown. Sometimes, it’s torpid and just drifts along as if it had nowhere to go. It occurs to me that everything has moods - the sky, the birds, the garden. Dark clouds appear out of nowhere and occlude the sun. Flowers suddenly spring to attention after a passing shower. I can go in a heartbeat from a place of clarity where I see my serene reflection and know my intention, to a place of murky, turbulent disarray.

My mother would have been one hundred and fourteen today. She had many moods, too. She could be imperious, convinced of her version of reality and determined to enforce it. She could be flirtatious and weepy, occasionally emotionally extravagant but mostly closed off like the wing of a building under renovation, her inclination to be heard quashed by the prevailing rules about how far women could reasonably expect to go. Mother’s ashes are buried beneath a flat slab of marble in my back garden. They are slowly being absorbed into the soil.

But I’m not thinking of those ashes today. I’m thinking about the large metal container, like a five-pound honey can, that arrived at the local post office more than forty years ago with my father’s ashes. I got one of those notices from the mailman that said there was a parcel waiting for me, but I surely didn’t expect it to be my father, even though I was the only one in the family who wanted him after he died. We took him down to the river off Dugway Road in Mohican territory, some distance from his original asphalt-paved birthplace. We pried open the can with a key. The contents were shockingly white, not gray like cigarette or fireplace ash. They were partly granular and partly bone-like in shape. So many pieces of chalk. This was what was left of my father here on the material plane, a gentle, rotund man who sold antiques and collected stamps. We sprinkled him into the Housatonic so he could go as a river, wending his way back to where he came from, emptying into the Long Island Sound, commingling with the Hudson and finally arriving at the Atlantic where the great river of his life met up with the eternal river of a larger life.

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Signed copies of my 2019 essay collection Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement are available directly from me. The book can also be ordered from Amazon or your local bookseller.