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.