We have to drive back to Baltimore today—Memorial Day weekend
on the Eastern Shore dissolved into the outer fringe of a tropical storm
cartwheeling off the coast of the Carolinas northward. Days like these remind
me of when I was a child, weeks removed from heading back to school. Trips to
the baseball diamond with my brother or on my grandmother’s sofa, devouring
Nancy Drew mysteries and wondering why "The Love Boat" was such a bad show, even
to my largely uncultured mind at the time, stopped, and so did time, as I sat
motionless on the couch, trying to squeeze every second out of every minute
with a kind of Zen mindfulness intending to make the world grind to a halt. I
did not want to go back to school—I wanted summer to last forever even if, for
all purposes, it wasn’t even fun anymore, just me lying around, bemoaning
the eventual ending of an orange that still had a lot of juice left in it.
I am still this ruminating, time-halting worrier, preferring
to press the last leaves of summer under glass rather than climb the trees and
feel the sun on my face. Of course, the rain today doesn’t help. I’ve chosen to
work instead, writing a book review and an essay for an online journal, tangible
measures of my time that I can return to over and over again instead of my
fleeting memories. And maybe that is why I write—to slow, perhaps stop, the
unstoppable march of time, a feat not even the gods could manage. All while the
rain keeps coming—before I was born, after I will die. And I will live on, too,
in some way I cannot catalog. A scary but inevitable transition, one my mother
has already made, my father, many of my relatives, some of my dear friends. That
so many soldiers have made, on the day we celebrate their sacrifice. I know I
should live to live, not live to die, but sometimes, trapped in the house, a
holiday dampened by weather, I am reminded of endings. But not today, I promise.
Today I will not count the wedges left in the orange. I will suck the juice,
let it stick to my fingers, not worry about later thirsts.
