The day was a poem.
We drove through the Everglades on a road called Alligator Alley to see relatives we never see on a beach with wild turtles we’ve never been to on the Gulf of Mexico.
My eyes hurt from narrowing to capture details as we drove at lightening speed through the wetlands. My strain was rewarded by spotting alligators, egrets, ibises, osprey, pelicans, vultures and one wild buck trotting by with less fear than common in a deer. To fill the gaps in time, I read my boys a book about a book that came alive as a pirate and took a frightened boy on an unwilling, nerve-fortifying adventure.
And then we were there.
The state park had a sign at the entrance with a pictogram x-ing out martinis. What was forbidden? we wondered. The glass? The alcohol? The olive? The lack of language made us feel fine and dandy about our glass bottles of beer. We had no olives.
We met my father’s sister, her husband, their daughter, and her (my cousin’s) son whom I’d never met, but already loved. That’s the way it is with this kid. He’s utterly lovable from the first moment you hear of his existence. His mother fell in love with him by pictures too, before she travelled halfway around the world, literally to Kathmandu, to meet him and take him home.
Those weren’t the only introductions. My cousin met my husband and sons for the first time. Our three little boys spent the day surfing already-crashed waves on boogie boards and making drip castles in the sand. Their age difference was the same gap between my cousin and me. We have another cousin who was not present, but was also born within a year of us. We used to call ourselves the golden girls because of our blond hair.
Three little girls one generation.
Three little boys the next.
We watched them and stalked them with our cameras. A family trait. Is photography genetic? Our grandfather used to take 2,000 pictures a year back in the days of film and shoulder pads. That sounds like nothing now, but in the 80s, it was crazy. My father too. I inherited his heavy Nikon, although I haven’t yet taken possession of it.
Our conversations were about weather, jobs, children, lunch. Pauses filled the air and it seemed I was the only Chatty Cathy trying to fill them until it dawned on me that I needn’t. Nothing could be expressed in a single afternoon that would explain our lives and love to each other. The points of divergence and intersection were already clear. Quiet was OK. It was the act of our being together, the fact of our relation to one another, that held everything from an hour before lunch to four hours past.
There is silence in poetry. Dead space is just as alive as the alphabet in a poem. Actual words are less important that what isn’t stated outright. Meaning beyond language settles into the blank space beside the letters.
I left our group to gather lion’s paw seashells for my cousin. She had never seen them before, but was delighted to make their acquaintance. There was a thick line of shells brought in by the tide that was too wide for people to bother not trampling. Footprints of beachgoers haplessly made sand out of the ocean’s treasures. I collected a big handful, including one especially pretty paw print, orange on a gray background, and smiled as I plopped the loot into my cousin’s cupped hands.
Today’s gift.
As I watched the three little boys play in the surf, I dared to ask the question my mother could never answer. What was my dad like as a boy? I learned that he was curious, curious, quiet, smart, and smart. I counted every word because every word about the mysterious man who once loved me counts. In the third grade he came home from school angry that the teacher was spending more time on long division. After two days of lessons, he had it down pat and was ready to move on.
That poem of my father as a little boy was a single stanza, but one I instantly put to heart.
After a photo shoot, a million tight hugs, and invitations all around to visit anytime, we drove back the same way we had come. That stretch of Interstate I haven’t travelled often enough to find familiar, so it felt less like we were going home and more like we were going back in time, erasing the beautiful day mile by mile, except for the traces left on my camera, this page, and my heart.
When the boys tuckered out, silence filled the car.
Until I broke it:
My father has been dead for thirty-seven years.
Later:
He has been dead longer than he was alive.
It was the first time I ever did the math, and the sum total of the years hung in the air, suspended, as we left behind the century-old cyprus trees, dangling with air plants and time-worn beauty, to the endless acres of sawgrass that make you feel you can see forever, except all you see is the same which, after a while, seems like nothing.
But it is something.
Something beautiful that I witnessed with my own two eyes
on the day that was a poem.
Leave a Reply