Puce, or Running Down a Word

We were talking about clutter, specifically all these clothes I don’t wear.  

I only really wear two pairs of pants, I admit.

And you have those puce ones, too, my wife reminds me.

Puce?

I meant puke, she says, as in puke-colored. Though puce is a color, too.

And I wouldn’t think of this exchange again, until later the same day I see the word puce in print. 

And this very same day the word galleon appears in the NY Times word game, “Connections,” and again, the same day I read it–galleon– in a Joyce Carol Oates story: “galleon clouds.”  (Aside: I hated, capital H, the story.) 

            I decide to revisit the word puce in print and I go to the story I read it in, Karen Russell’s “Madam Bovary’s Greyhound.”  I want to see the exact context and all my brain has retained is the single word. I had recently bought a used copy of this book, Orange World hoping to find her story “The Ghost Birds” in it, but alas the story came later. I bought Orange World to hold me over until her newly published novel, The Antidote, drops a little in price. Russell is not for everyone due to her flat-out bonkers premises.  In “The Bog Girl,” for example, a fifteen-year-old peat worker falls in love with the bog-preserved 2,000-year-old body of a young woman.  I don’t read Russell’s stories for their premises.  I love her sentences. Her language and powers of observation are incredible.

            So I reread “The Bog Girl,” first, looking for the sentence with the word puce. No go.  But I do see this brilliant three sentence characterization of a minor character:

 

“Uncle Sean was a as blandly ugly a as a big toenail.  Egg bald and cheerfully unemployed, a third helpings kind of guy.  Once, Cillian, had watched him eat the sticker on a green apple rather than peel it off.”

Maybe if I hadn’t reread the story this brilliant characterization wouldn’t have planted itself so  happily in my consciousness.

Then I went on to “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound,” the next story in the book, which, by Russell’s standard is quite a bit less bonkers. Writing it only required the writer to inhabit an already fictional dog’s consciousness. I read the story again. Nope.  A third time, nope.  I’m a little slow, but conclude the word is not there.  Duh.

 

            Aside: this used copy of Orange World is filled with the marginalia of its previous owner.  The marginalia is peculiar, often math-centered: next to a line that reads “nine-hundred and fifty dollars” the reader has inscribed $950.  Not every story is commented on.  Some of the marginalia is inscrutable and I come to understand that not only is the reader a second-language speaker of English, but their native tongue is Farsi. This sentence from near the end of “Madam Bovary’s Greyhound” required much research of them: “He glanced fondly at little Hubert, attributing the little greyhound’s spasms in the cemetery drifts to the usual culprits: giddiness ort fleas.”

In the margin in miniscule printing a gloss on the hand-underlined words: muscular contraction; a word in Farsi, presumably synonymous with culprit; dizziness; and 2,500 types of nonflying insects.  And now I am thinking this earlier reader’s efforts to read this book are heroic.

 

Just to be sure, because three readings might be insufficient, I buy a copy of the book on Kindle because that medium allows the reader to perform a word search.  (My wife: “You did WHAT?”) And here I should say that this is the first occasion of me buying the e-version of a book I already own the physical copy of.  Backwards of my more typical modus operandi: buying the hard copy of a book I have already read on Kindle. 

Another aside: Now, checking my Kindle library I find that even Kindle-to-actual-book duplication is reasonably rare for me (at least, I think it’s reasonable.) Five occasions. (Note that I am well aware that I am not making here a case here for my own sanity nor normalcy, etc.)

Kindle’s search engine informs me that Russell does not use the word puce in the book Orange World.  Whatever else I have read this morning cannot be recovered.

So, I decide to let puce go.  I obviously can’t recall where I had seen it; only that I had.  Before final abandonment I decide to check my favorite dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (1969 edition). Puce is “deep red to dark grayish purple.” Somewhat enigmatically, it’s from the French word puce, meaning flea.

And now I’ll let it go, in the words of the great Iris Dement song, “Let the Mystery Be”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlaoR5m4L80

            

 

 

 

Books I Saved from the Fire, or Answers to Questions You Didn’t Ask

Books on your nightstand?

 

                  This is not curated.  These are the books that are actually there.

                  • The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr;

                  • The Use of Photography, Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie;

                  • Weekend Rock Oregon, Ron Horton.

 

 

Books You’d Save from the Fire? 

 

Books personally inscribed to me by their authors: 

• Steve Roper, Camp 4; 

• James Salter, Solo Faces;

 • Lou Whittaker, Memoir of a Mountain Guide;

• Chuck Sassara, Chuck Sassara’s Alaska: Propellers, Politic, People; 

• Eva Saulitis, Becoming Earth;

• Lives of the Saints, my Grandmother’s copy gifted to me and inscribed by my Aunt Katie Jackson.

 

Favorite Restaurants?

 

• Everyday: Bayview Thai, Depoe Bay. The owner, Wut, knows my order by heart (Green curry with chicken, medium spice).

• More upscale: Local Ocean, Newport.  When mussels are in season, get ‘em with curry, side order of toast.  

 

Beer?

 

• Block 15, Sticky Hands IPA (Corvallis).  But only one place in Lincoln City to get it on tap.

• More readily available standby: Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, which Aisha and I first started drinking at the Rustic Goat in Anchorage.  Can’t go wrong, plus they make an NA. Now we drink it right from the source at their Portland brewpub.

 

Guilty pleasure?

 

Highway 101, Lincoln City. Cheeseburger (with grilled onions). Comes with a tray of sauce for the fries with your name spelled in ketchup.  Tres chic.

 

Book that did not stand the test of time?

 

It’s painful to say this, but after Tom Robbins died a few weeks ago I picked up Jitterbug Perfumeagain.  I read about a hundred pages and, sadly, concluded that for all its sparkle and wit it felt very very dated, a glittering star of its moment.  But the moment has passed.

 

Best person to eat aforementioned cheeseburger with?

                  

Nick Dighiera.

 

Street Food

Highway 1011 Mexican food truck at The Pines in Lincoln City.  They have a lot of food trucks there, but Aisha and I go back to this place every time for a la cart tacos with carnitas.  She orders the veggie tostadas.

 

Favorite Bookstore?

 

Writers Block, Anchorage. More than a bookstore: the home of a true literary community.

 

Just one?

 

Well, no.  I love Powells in Portland.  One of the things I like about it is that there are a ton of people there buying books. Makes me happy.  Two new bookstores I love, also in PDX: Bishop & Wilde on Thurman and the new Literary Arts bookstore on the east side.  Both of these are really nicely curated and welcoming.  John King in Detroit is like time travel; I love that place.  The Mecosta Book Gallery on M 20 between Mount Pleasant and Big Rapids is a really wonderful little place.  In Chicago I like Exile in Bookville, newish, in the Fine Arts Building right on Michigan Avenue.

 

Books you were really surprised to learn something from?

                                    

• Julie Hecht, The Unprofessional, a novel;

                  • Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac.

 

I guess, I’d rather not say what I learned from these, but as the question states: I was surprised.

 

Favorite words?

 

A tie: “benign” and “clear margins.”

 

How are your books organized? 

                  

Organized?

 

Best books read recently?

 

I read these three memorable books in 2024:

 

                  • Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility;

                  • Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night;

                  • Thomas Olde Huzevelt, Echo;

 

Just now noticed how these three are definitely not any kind of realism.

 

What’s new and noteworthy in mountaineering literature? 

 

I loved Lisa Roderick’s A Place Among Giants: Twenty-two seasons at Denali Basecamp. Instant classic of Alaska Range literature.  Really beautiful.

 

Books that influenced you?

 

• Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue;

                  • “Climber as Visionary,” Doug Robinson;

                  • “Night Driving,” Dick Dorworth.

 

These pointed the way when I read them as younger person.  I still stand by them (even if the last two are essays, not books.)

 

 

Favorite sporting event to watch?
                                    

Tour de France. By far.

 

Podcasts?

                  Nope.

 

Blogs?

                  • “Fuck the New Yorker,” Nick Dighiera (every Monday!)

                  • Dad Bod, Matt Komatsu

                  • Lofty Minded in Alaska, Teresa Sundmark

 

Book that made you cry?

 

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean, for sure.  A single line in Tomorrow and  Tommorow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin brought a tear. Others too, probably, but it doesn’t happen often.  Was surprised recently watching the film A Complete Unknown.  I started crying when he sang “A Hard Rain ‘s Gonna Fall” and wept quietly through much of the rest of it. 

 

Did you learn anything by answering these self-imposed questions?

                  That all I do is read and eat?

 

 

Where Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake Took Me

 

I really enjoyed reading Rachel Kushner’s newest novel Creation Lake.  I only read a book I like this much about once or twice a year (I read fifty or sixty books a year).  I had just come off binge watching both Slow Horses and Black Doves, the former is superb, the later . . . somewhat regrettable.  In any case, these unwittingly primed me for a novel about spies, in Kushner’s case, a spy-for-hire who narrates the book. Kushner’s character is smart and interesting, a likable sociopath (which should be an oxymoron but isn’t).

            I had read two previous books by Kushner, her debut novel The Flamethrowers and her more recent essay collection, The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000–2020. I preferred the essays. I may reread The Flamethowers to try to articulate how and why she happened to not one hundred percent win me over.  I liked her portrayal of the motorcycle world—about which I knew nothing—but had a hard time buying her descriptions of downhill skiing, about which I know a fair bit.   Maybe that’s it: a reader with any expertise is often hyper-critical of a writer who stakes claim to the same territory.  But Kushner’s love of motorcycles, cars, and speed is pretty damned convincing (even though in “Girl on a Motorcycle” she describes a harrowing accident that almost defies our belief).  Almost: I did believe it, but HOLY SHIT.  Also, I read somewhere that she is afficionado of the Ford Galaxy, which at first seems unlikely, but ultimately wins over any native son of Dearborn, Michigan, where it seemed everyone’s dad worked for Ford and a Galaxy sat in every driveway, or, in many cases the station wagon version, the Country Squire. These were conveniently equipped with an enormous 390 for when mom had to haul ass to the grocery store.

            In Creation Lake the narrator's task is to infiltrate a leftist commune of eco-terrorists in France and set them up for an assassination attempt, or at least, a fall. To put herself in position to do this she enters into a love affair––at least the partner thinks it is a love affair––with a French man at whose country estate she stays, alone, while infiltrating the group.  Late in her stay she initiates an affair with Rene, one of the members of the group.

    Rene had been a factory worker at a Daimler plant in Germany.  “Rene’s job was to stamp metal panels that would become car doors.” Further, she says, “in order to activate the compression for stamping . . . you had to have both hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm.”  The point of this explanation was that workers found a way to circumvent the safety mechanism and maim themselves by “sacrifice a functioning limb” in order to receive compensation enough to buy a new E-Class Mercedes (gotta love that it was specifically an E Class) and receive a lifetime pension.

            This is where the book and my life intersect (probably the only place) and now I leave the text and sink into memory. 

In the late spring of 1973 I took at job at the Dearborn Stamping Plant, part of Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. I operated a spot welding machine on the assembly line, afternoon shift.  

            The parking lot at the plant was enormous and I remember the walk from the car to my work station took as long as the drive from my home to the parking lot.  You could actually take a bus from the lot through the gates, but I never took it. On my very first day I remember passing a guy leaving the day shift with an enormous white bandage swaddling his hand. I distinctly remember him smiling, though it never occurred to me he might have done this on purpose.  In any case, my thought was what fresh new hell is this?

            The work was almost exactly as Kushner describes: I grabbed a small piece of metal, placed it of a larger piece of metal on a moving track, and pressed two buttons, one with each hand, which activated the spot welder, and moved the piece down to the next station.

            When the spot welder ignited, the points of contact would shoot a stream of sparks that often hit me in the face, once somehow finding my eyes despite the safety goggles.  Another time, my supervisor came by and mimed—you couldn’t hear anything in there—to brush my head—then I smelled it, the sparks had ignited my hair. 

            I’ve seen photographs of the assembly line today: clean and bright, the workers attired in shining white lab coats. It wasn’t that like that in 1973. The line was dark and dirty, loud and dangerous, more like something out of a Dickens novel than a model of late 20^thcentury engineering.  From my work station—from which, by the way, I never moved––I could see a tiny open window in the ceiling far above me.  Once in a while a star would pass across it.

            Mike Schonhofen, another Dearborn and Ford refugee, and I were remembering this the other day: the white large sign at the gates that announced in red letters DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT: then there was a number that could be changed by hand like an old-fashioned baseball scoreboard. We laughed that the number was always zero, only a bit of an exaggeration.

            When my shift was over, if I hurried, I could get to the bar, The New Place, ten minutes before last call. At least a half dozen of my friends would be there––had been there all night—and I could order three beers, Strohs, and drink them in the forty minutes before the lights went on, blinding us and ushering us out to the parking lot where we would stand around for another hour or so shooting the shit.  What we might have talked about is utterly lost to me now.  The friends: P.J., Clay, the Arch, Simmons are all gone now. The New Place remains.

            Some nights I would meet up with my friend John who also worked an afternoon shift at a steel plant west of the city and we would plan the mountaineering trip that we would take at the end of the summer. We wouldn’t want to wake up anyone at our parents’ houses so we’d just walk the streets, talking, full of plans, too wired to sleep.  After the climbing trip John would head to Durham England for junior year abroad, and I would go to Mexico ostensibly to research a book about the volcanoes there.

            At the end of the summer I left the assembly line for my travels. I felt guilty about quitting.  Just about everyone who worked there was working at the best job they could ever hope to have.  We were paid very well for the work; all you had to do was sign over your soul. When I returned from Mexico I had enough money left to buy a used car—a 1968 American Motors Javelin. It would be another year before I left Michigan for good–in the Javelin. I think of Dylan’s line “Drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west.”  More accurately, the Javelin abandoned me first.  It was towed to Gunther’s boneyard east of Yelm, Washington and I drove out of there in a 1970 VW Squareback.

            Someone once asked me what the part was that I welded.  I couldn’t begin to guess. If it had a name, I didn’t know it.  Could I, at least, tell what car I was working on?  I could.  It was a four-door Maverick.  Designed as a poor man’s Mustang, but really it was just a cut above Ford’s other bad idea, the Pinto. I haven’t  seen one of those Mavericks on the road in decades, but you might find one in some mechanic’s steely boneyard, among the Country Squires and Javelins.

            

Almost Winter Solstice

The day before the shortest day of the year

we drive to town to do errands,

 

stop at Robert’s Books to drop off a box for store credit, or to be 

donated to the library,

 

drive past the feed store by mistake,

 

drop off the glass for recycling, remembering now that we forgot the batteries,

 

stop at the Goodwill to drop off a couple bags of clothing,

 

the bank to get cash to pay Jim for installing the closet doors,

 

Barnacle Bills for just under a pound of freshly caught salmon,

 

return the cans with deposits for recycling at the grocers,

 

pick up just enough at the store to last the few days before we leave for Christmas,

 

stop at the department store for face cream with the added bonus of the man ahead in the checkout line who spends $110 on condoms and Viagra,

 

now remember the feed store for black sunflower seeds for our crow overlords,

 

the hardware store for putty to hold the window screen in that keeps blowing out in the 

winds,

 

finally, street tacos from our favorite food truck and a couple drafts of IPA,

 

then, almost home, leave the coffee that Aisha ground for Rhonda on her front porch.

 

At sunset we walk down to the shore in unseasonably mild weather, where we meet our neighbors and watch, first, the sun set, and then, the running lights of the crab boats–eleven of them we count–blink on suddenly on the horizon as darkness falls. 

Singing Autumn Song: a Walk in the Tuscan Hills

 

We are driving in a medieval hilltop village in Tuscany. The driver stops the car in the middle of the street (the street is only about 12 feet wide: it is all middle) and he points up an ancient moss-covered rock stair well.  “The hike starts here,” he says.

         The steps are somewhat odd in that they don’t particularly lead to anything.  They end in a kind of road, a grown-over two-track that seems to function more as a property line than a road. In any case, they haven’t led to a plateau. The route ahead continues upward.

         First weekend in October and it’s rained the previous day so even though the sun is shining now, the ground is damp and the air chilled.  Just the week before Rome felt sweltering. But today autumn is in the air.  The air, the certainty of fall, calls to mind past fall hiking rituals, which in Alaska were often wet: the Goldmint Trail up in Hatcher Pass or the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward. We never seemed to be on those trails in summer, only fall, always wet.  Today is expected to be dry, but for adversity we have an awful lot of uphill travel.  My mind is supplying a Van Morrison soundtrack:

You just might feel like singing autumn song

You just might feel like singing autumn song.

         We are not on a trail.  It’s a road, or once was, surely no car could use it now.  To prevent the road from washing away completely, at some point a layer of rock fill had been added.  Among this rock fill are shards of colorful tile or pottery, which I imagined to be salvaged from excavation sites. 

We rarely know where we are. There is very little signage and when it does exist it is usually just inscrutable numbers and arrows.  Once we see a minuscule sign for mountain biking.  The terrain is steep and rocky.  Aisha says, “So this is where mountain bikers come to practice their deaths.”

We have a set of written directions, but following them is not easy. This is not due to the fact that they have been translated from Italian, but rather to the language, which I first thought to be vague and at some point changed my view: the words began to look timeless and mythic:

Pass on your right a country house.  

Go straight.  

The trail enters a wood. 

There is a mill grinding stone on your track.

         It was like following breadcrumbs of words. After many wrong turns we deferred to our GPS. 

         Although we did not see any people we came upon a burro in a fenced field. It was very curious, friendly.  But all we had for it were Aisha’s words, “Hi baby, hi baby.”  It was, by the way, a spectacular field with terrific views of the countryside from which we had ascended. 

         Finally we did see a person, a hunter. He had five wet dogs, two muddy spaniels and three others of indeterminate breed.  The hunter was not young and was attired in tweed and leather.  Slung at his back was an elegant shotgun, highly polished. He looks like a gamekeeper out of an early twentieth century British novel. He greeted us almost tersely; he was hunting cinghiale, wild boar.  We had seen the word on menus.  Aisha’s most fervent wish was to not encounter one of these in the wild. We did not.

                  At the junction with a metal crucifix, take the left branch and keep

climbing.  Shortly after reaching a pine wood, the trail starts descending.

         Finally we crested some kind of ridge and soon in the distance we could see where our hike would end: Lake Trasimene.

         We found a spot for lunch with a view of the lake.  Grapes and olives, although we had not understood in advance that we would, in fact, be walking much of the day through olive groves and vineyards.  Pecorino cheese and bread. A shared piece of chocolate.  Plenty of water.

         After lunch was easier, gravity now our ally, and it would be almost impossible to miss the Lake, although still possible to miss the rendezvous spot with our driver.

    

Reach a first house of the village with a garden and continue on the tarmac road.

Now the walking was very easy.  We stopped to take the last of our water at an archaeological site, an “ustrina” designed by Hannibal’s engineers.  These appeared to be large bricked-in holes, perhaps fifteen feet deep and thirty feet in circumference.  Over the top were enormous iron grates of latticed iron.  There were two of them and we sat on a bench in the adjacent vineyard.  We had assumed these were enormous cisterns for storing water.  Later we learned these were elaborate cremation sites to dispose of the bodies of the dead soldiers. 

Historical aside: Lake Trasimene is the site of a famous battle of the Punic War (217 B.C.) between Hannibal and the Romans.  When he left Carthage, Hannibal’s army consisted of 100,000 soldiers and 40 “war elephants.” He crossed the Alps with these beasts.  Hannibal’s army “won” the battle of Trasimene, killing 15,000 Romans.  Our driver told us so many were killed said the lake ran red with blood.  Ultimately Hannibal did not defeat the Romans, but neither did they defeat him.

When I was in grade school I learned a song that went:

         Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal,

         Hannibal crossed the Alps.

This has stuck with me all these years–I couldn’t tell you why–and now I couldn’t get it out of my head.

         We were looking forward to having a beer at the café at our pick-up point, but nothing was open.  It was lakeside resort now we were in the off-season and the place had an aura of sad abandonment and an empty trash-blown parking lot.  When our driver found us he only had one question, “Did you see the burro?” 

         I count this among the perfect days of my life (I would find find out Aisha did not feel quite the same; all day long she held onto a secret mantra: “Don’t whine, don’t whine, don’t whine.”)  I didn’t know. Because she did not whine. 

        

         In the car as we drove back to our hotel I thought of another of my favorites by Van Morrison, “Coney Island.”  It ends like this: 

I look at thes side of your face

As the sunlight comes streaming through the window

In the autumn sunshine

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking 

‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it?

Dia de los Muertos 2024 or Notes on Not Letting Go: A Photo Essay

 

Nine years ago today, the first of November, I was home alone when I heard the knock on the door, after which nothing would ever be the same.  They found his body in Willow Creek, east of the Parks Highway, the road to Denali. Possibly he had been there since the day before.  Dia de los Muertos. When was the universe ever this fucking literal?

 

After a few days passed–in a grief-stunned blur–one of the concrete chores was to retrieve his truck from the impound lot.  I suppose I hoped the truck would reveal some clue to the mystery of his death, but that would not prove to be the case.

The truck bed was partially filled with snow, a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon frozen in place, scraps of lumber, the crutches that he had needed until recently.  His last text to me weeks earlier, saved of course, reads “I think I snapped my ankle skateboarding.  Can you take me to the emergency room?”  Later we found out he had not been skateboarding, but had jumped off the roof of his friend’s house. Somewhere there’s a video of him leaping off a rock outcropping into a steep slope of soft snow.  He emerges unscathed and speaks directly into the camera: “I recommend it, dude.”  Heights, including earth, for example, were just things from which to launch himself.

 

That his truck was a mess was no surprise.  What was surprising was the clutch was shot. I had to nurse it back to Anchorage, with no real expectation of making it home.

 

The decision was made to sell it rather than replace the clutch.  I emptied the truck out, fully conscious that every object it contained was something touched by him.

         

I scraped up the greasy coins. That was one bag.

 

The cigarette butts, another.

 

And finally the guitar picks, which I added to the other guitar picks littered around the house. When he walked guitar picks scattered in his wake.

 

The last PBR.

 

We moved out of that house he off-and-on shared with us a few months after he was gone.  Sometimes when I was in Anchorage painful memories were fixed to particular places, the corner of Arctic and Tudor, to name one stop on a private map of grief.  I travelled through the city carefully.  And now we’ve left Alaska.  

Nine years gone. Dia de los Muertos. Don’t worry, Macklin, we’re never letting go.

         

When you're retired is it still called a vacation?

Early in the visit our son’s little dog Kush suffers a heart attack.  She is thirteen years old and has 

previously survived a vicious attack from larger dogs and being hit by a car.  Now she has just shown off 

her I’ve still got it speed” and then collapsed with a heartbreaking yelp.  Dougal shifts into emergency 

mode and administers CPR, bringing her back to life. This little dog has been his anchor to this earth and 

no one wants to think about a world without her in it.

 

I’ve seen my old friend Ed three times in the last year.  That is, three times since his “cognitive decline” has been so pronounced that he needs to be watched 24 hours a day.  But this is the first time my wife has seen him in this new much-diminished state.  She is learning how to talk to him. 

“How long were you married to her, Ed?” My wife asks innocently enough.

“Oh,” says Ed, “I don’t know, two or three years.”

The actual number of years is 21, Ed’s son, behind him, signs to us.

Ed is hopeful that “the bad thing” that has happened to him will reverse itself as mysteriously as it came on.

“The memories are all still in there, aren’t they?” I ask, “It’s just really really hard to access them?”

“That’s it!” he says, face alight.

 

Our family is only a few generations removed from our Irish homeland. My mother is visited by my brother’s old friend Jim.  Jim tells her about his visit to distant relatives in Ireland. At the cemetery Jim asks about the epidemic that killed so many of his ancestors.

“Epidemic?” his cousin corrects, “They were starved to death.”

 

My son is the same age I was when I started graduate school.  33.  He says, “Same age as Jesus when he died.”  He pauses, adds, “Time to start overturning tables at the temples and consorting with whores.”

 

My mother’s eyebrows have gone in reverse from white to black.  Black streaks, too, now visible in her hair.  She is 93 years old.  

 

If my mother keeps losing years as I add them, in 2034 we will be the same age.

 

“I’d like to know,” Ed says, “where my motorcycle is.  And my Ford Falcon.  “I’d like to work on those,” he says, “take them out on the road.”  His son, behind him, shaking his head: no way.

 

My son is highly skeptical of the presidential choices he’s been offered in his voting life.  “Who would you happily vote for?” I ask.

“Erykah Badu,” he says, “I’d vote for her.”

 

If you were out on the lake and didn’t know the wetlands existed, you couldn’t find the channel that leads to and through them.  It’s hidden in a wall of cattails and all manner of lake vegetation, snags and stumps of a ghost forest. The channel winds through a lush swampland, home to herons and red-winged blackbirds, the swan family rules there and the loons, the pair of them, nest there, too.  My mother’s happiness as we kayak through here is almost a humming thing.  Turtles give her a special pleasure. She sits in the front seat of the two-seater; I’m in the back.  My wife is in a solo rig.  Our son has borrowed a third boat and his dog, Kush, an aging eleven-pound terror, surveys the watery terrain from his lap. We glide silently through the glassy channel, each moment suffused with a kind of holiness.

 

A summer ritual since our children were small: a hike to the lighthouse at Big Sable on Lake Michigan.  We go out on a service road through the dunes and come back on the shoreline, where sometimes the bones of an old shipwreck reveal themselves in the shifting sand.  Our family photo albums have a yearly shot of the boys.  It’s three of us now, not four.  We don’t talk about him, but I know there are long silences in which we are feeling our loss. The dog, who is not supposed to be there anyway, has to be carried through the heat. We have the coastline to ourselves.  Another holy ritual.

 

My wife takes a photograph of Ed and me. I don’t look at it until much later. The image surprises me.  Ed, always a strong guy, looks like he’s physically shrinking commensurate with his diminished memory. “It’s the way it is,” Ed said, many times during our visit.

 

My mother awakens us.  The northern lights.  We walk by the light of our phones carefully down to the lake’s edge.  We are on the south side of the lake, so there is little ambient light ahead of us. There they are: green and red, a faint shimmer.  My mother had never seen them before this summer, her 93^rd.  Now she has seen them, twice. It’s never too late for a miracle.