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Lisa took a photo of me playing cards. It’s become a regular thing in our home, the four of us frequently convene after dinner for highly competitive games of “Oh, Hell!”
I took Lisa’s original color photo and fooled around with simple iPhone edit features, then cropped it a couple of times, to come up with this angsty sequence. Mostly this post is because I wanted a way to see them together, like rolling film.
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They say you shouldn’t live in the past.
“Be present in the here and now.”
But the older I get,
the more past there is.
It keeps piling up.
And, of course, that’s the only place
I can go to visit
some of my favorite people.
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A favorite photo of my father,
Mr. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
Not a big drinker, don’t mean
to give that impression.
But he liked his Scotch.
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I’m struck by a memory this morning and thought I’d write it down before, you know, it all evaporates into the mist of dementia. I’m not there yet!
One week when I was young — let’s guess that I was six or seven — my elderly grandparents came to watch us while my parents went away on a trip. This was a rare and usual thing for our family.
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At that time, I was infatuated with baseball and “ball games” of any description. I’d fill hours by playing imaginary games, keeping score in notebooks. I’d throw a Spaulding against the back of our house, perfecting my Jerry Koosman-inspired windup. Whap, whap, whap, endlessly against the red shingles.
Well, grandpa was old and he needed his naps. He slept in my oldest brother Neal’s room — who must have been away at Princeton at the time — which was right next to the target for my incoming missiles.
The poor guy couldn’t sleep a wink.
Here’s the amazing part. They could have easily forbid me from doing the thing I loved most of all. Entirely reasonable request. Grandpa needs his sleep. But they didn’t. Instead, the next day, my grandparents arrived with a pitchback they’d purchased at a local sports store. “Here you go, slugger, use this as a target. Just, please, no more slamming against the house.”
Wonder of wonders. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
Man, I loved that pitchback. Sploing, sploing, sploing. We positioned it under our backyard apple tree and I played for hours every day while Grandpa, I hope, got his rest.
That’s called problem-solving, folks. And kindness. I didn’t fully get it at the time, but I do now.
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I enjoyed a weekend of camping with my wife and daughter and our incredible dog, Echo. We brought a canoe and two kayaks. And let me tell you, it got cold at night, close to freezing! I felt a twinge of guilt staring at our big roaring fires in the verdant Northeastern woods, while those devastating wildfires out west still burn. My heart goes out to all those people and living creatures that have been displaced, their homes destroyed, landscapes (temporarily) ravaged. My wife had a childhood home burn to the ground. She’d been out at basketball practice, only to return to a worried crowd gathered outside, her father in tears. So many people must be experiencing that same tumult of emotion and loss.
So, yes, a moment for that.
But also for John Muir, and the value of getting out into nature, feeling it, hearing those owls at night, the coyotes surprisingly close, and the ghostly calls of the loons across the lake.
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Like-minded readers might enjoy my middle-grade wilderness survival story about siblings, Grace and Carter, who are lost in the mountains. A 2019 Library Guild Selection.
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