On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

On Weeping

On a November day just after Thanksgiving, a year before a virus arrived to change the world, I noticed a very young grandson’s boot in a dark corner of our dining room, where he must have kicked it off. Somehow his parents had left it behind when they went home.

How little it was! And how little I could find to complain about, an old guy who’s seen less tragedy and ill fortune than most. But I instantly recalled a morning many, many years before, when my lifelong friend Don dropped by. Following their divorce, his ex-wife had moved with their children to another state. After they’d gone, he told me how he cried on finding his son’s small toothbrush in a cabinet.

I thought I understood back then. I’m married for good, please God, and for me even the Covid lockdown has been scarcely a time of hardship. Still, I understand those feelings of Don’s a lot better now. That tiny boot made me weep.

Tears come more freely as my years accumulate and dwindle. For whatever reason, I keep referring to Fats Domino. When he died a few Octobers back, for instance, I spoke on the phone with another friend of decades, dead himself last spring. Like me, he still delighted in a certain kind of music we craved in Fats’s time. We sniffled over his passing and reminisced, and thanked our stars that the man and some others had delivered us from Ricky Nelson, Georgia Gibbs, Pat Boone, Teresa Brewer, and the like.

I now and then find myself singing in poor imitation: We happy in my blue heav-awn. Fats’s rendition was the first rock ‘n’ roll 45 I ever bought. On hearing it one morning, my poor hungover mother blurted, “What in the world is that?” Well, what it was not, to her clear disgust, was the Tin Pan Alley version she knew, all strings and lilies and light.

Just now I drink up the sun through our kitchen window. On such bright days, northern New England’s November can be exquisite, the naked land like a woodcut, its mountains’ contours chiseled. But let even one cloud come to block that light and my tears stand by – which I guess isn’t hard to explain. On the other hand, come to think, sunshine can bring them on too.

Our nest is empty. How we loved the five children and, needless to say, we still do. But the girls are women, and our boys have long since grown their beards more quickly than I can now. I am far beyond mere happiness that they have their own children, all living quite near. They’re often at our house, in fact – or they were until twelve months back. We have missed half of the youngest one’s two years of life in this epoch of quarantine.

I remembered sitting amidst all those children and grandchildren on that last family Thanksgiving, here at the table where I’ve chosen to write this. I look over, and it’s as though that small boot still stares at me from its nook.

In due course, somehow the plague will be defeated, or so we’re cautiously led to believe, though now the Delta variant has set things askew, and an idiot throng of Americans still shun the mask and the vaccine. If recovery does in fact become general, I pray there will be many further assemblies of our sprawling clan. This place will be a mess. I feel only joy to imagine havoc again, litter of toys and games, furniture bullied askew, small footwear kicked off in haste. I look forward to young parents dancing with their sons and daughters to music whose pleasures I’m too old to fathom. But I too will do as much of such dancing as I can.

I’ll see all this, no doubt, with blurred vision.