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

Abiding Beauty

 

When we were boys, we called it The Cabin, though by then it had things that on buying the place our grandfather had lacked: light, heat, plumbing, telephone – all the modern rest.

Its little lake was full of sunfish. They were easily fooled, though when we three brothers caught them, they looked too bright to kill. As kids, we didn’t use terms like loveliness but we grasped the idea of it and threw our catch back more often than not.

Years later, I, the eldest, sit in the parking lot of a huge box store; I’m waiting for my wife to emerge with goods for our own cabin, more than five hundred miles north of grandpa’s, a place as close as I’ll ever come to that childhood one, with its carefree summers, its lake and ridge, all of which I still invoke as paradigms of worldly welcome.

I have stayed in the car to keep an eye on our three dogs, who crowd the backseat. They are as eager as I am to be somewhere else but they’ll stay patient – unlike the woman whose words I just heard through my half-open rear window. She barked at her husband, You don’t call me beautiful no more!  Then, swinging her tote bag almost like a weapon, she scurried away from him and, because he had a severe limp, the poor man couldn’t catch up.  As she fled, he called to her I do! I do! like a wheezed reiteration of an old wedding vow.

Where and how do they live, those two, I wonder? That man’s about my age, so I feel both curiosity and an instinctive sympathy, though I know I can have no insight into their relationship.

When we three boys sat on the dam at The Cabin, those fish nipped our toes. I have motives to think of such precious moments as heat shimmers over this asphalt expanse. The dogs keep panting, but not from that heat alone.

It strikes me, as it has so often, how little a person can see of the future: one of us brothers dying in his thirties or two sisters’ coming after the boyhood I’m reminiscing about. Nor would I have dreamed up a sprawling, crowded place like this. There was no way for a young boy – or anyone, really – to predict that one day I’d perform these mental leaps from cabin to cabin. It would have been impossible to conceive of marriage, and especially to imagine a wife to whom I’d be so devoted, or any wife at all.

But I see mine coming out of that mammoth store. Her shopping bag is full and heavy, and I leap out to take it from her. As I approach, she smiles, this four-decade love of my life.

I tell her out loud: You’re beautiful.

 

 

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Battle of the Horns

 

I haven’t played the instrument for many, many years, but in the periodic effort to clean out the Augean stables of our attic, I came upon it, still gorgeous, shiny and black in its maroon velvet case. Could I still manage a tune or two? I decided not even to try, lulled instead into bitter reverie.

Cats and dogs? I inwardly scoffed. They don’t know how to fight. My brother and I could have taught them a thing or two – no, a whole lot more than that!

I played that clarinet and my brother played French horn. Horn players, it seems, lead shorter lives, which I didn’t learn until quite a while later. Like everything else, our instruments were tools of war. His big bell would bray at me, and my slender stick screech back at him. What a racket! And what fools we were, our only aim on earth not to harmonize. Not at all. We literally fought to shatter harmony.

Sometimes the family’s actual cats and dogs would howl in alarm. And I remember a day when a squirrel outside froze on its limb for an instant, then hauled ass as high up the sick window-elm as possible.

A brain hemorrhage killed my brother at 35.

In contemplating and regretting life’s copious mistakes, I’ve often wondered, what was all that wrangling for? Wasn’t there at least some touch of love underneath it all? Forty years after his death, I try to recall traces of better feelings, and better sounds than those squalls we made, louder even than the hail that slams our metal roof just now, as if to burst the ceiling.