And all love is, is patience. Taking time. Focusing, and taking time. That’s love.
This was disappointing to us! This was not anything we wanted to hear. We were too young to have a clue how special human love and human patience were, how rare and fleeting, and if Daddy might be laughing at us, you could never tell if Daddy was serious or laughing or serious-laughing, both at once.
The last time at Katechay Island.
No premonition. Not a clue.
AT THE SHORE at Katechay Island, on Wild Fowl Bay (an inlet of Saginaw Bay/Lake Huron). Not the sandy beach where people swam in warm weather but the farther beach which was coarse and pebbly and the sand dunes were hard-packed and cold even in the sun. The beach there was littered with kelp, rotted pieces of wood, long-rotted little fish and bodies of birds, scattered bones. It was a blinding-bright day to be near the water, a cold day, and a windy day, so that the water was like something shaken, sharp as tinfoil, and there was nowhere for your eye to remain, always the water was changing, and if you looked too hard, the sight of it was hurtful.
It was a hike along the shore, that last hike that no one knew was last. A two-point-five-mile hike, Daddy said.
On our hikes Daddy would announce the distance, going and returning. For some of us were not such strong hikers as others. Some of us had to be assured, Daddy would pick us up in his arms and carry us back, if our legs grew tired, if our knees buckled.
For Daddy always assured with a wink: Nobody’s going to be abandoned.
Gus Voorhees was a doctor, he favored precision. Blood tests, scans of internal organs, X-rays and MRIs. Not-knowing is not a virtue, you may pay for not-knowing with your life.
Kids, always remember: Ignorance is not bliss.
If he asked you a question, you must give a precise answer. You must not mumble vaguely, and you must meet his eye.
Hey. Look up. Look here.
Daddy was naturally a smiler. So when Daddy did not smile, you knew it.
Out of breath trying to keep up with Daddy! Sand-dune hills and little ravines, that disintegrated when we stepped near them, and pulled at our feet. Wind rushing against our faces, sucking away our breaths and making our eyes water foolishly as if we were crying.
Yet, we would keep up with Daddy. Naomi and Melissa, the little girls, determined to keep up in the wake of their longer-legged brother Darren, and Darren in the wake of Daddy who’d become distracted, forget where he was, stride on ahead.
Oh Daddy!—wait.
Wait for us. Daddy!
This day, this hiking-day at the shore at Wild Fowl Bay had not seemed like a special day. It had not seemed like a day to be remembered and so, much of it has been lost. Like tattered flags flying at the lighthouse lunch place, at Bay Point. What the flags were meant to be, you couldn’t tell because they were so faded. Daddy had driven us in the station wagon from our (rented) house near Bay City, an hour and twenty minutes drive to Katechay Island where there was a cabin we could use, belonging to friends of Daddy’s and Mommy’s who had given them the key. Except it was the end of summer, already it was late September, and the air was getting cold, even in the sun. And if the sun was obscured by clouds dark like crayon scribbles, you were made to shiver.
It was confusing to us, where Daddy had been in the weeks before this. For sometimes it was more than one place, and we could not remember the names which (perhaps) we resented, and did not want to remember. On this day, Daddy had returned early that morning from wherever he’d been, somewhere in northern Michigan where (as Daddy said) he was desperately needed as a consultant.
Desperately!—Mommy laughed. Is it ever anything less than desperate?
Adding, And what of us—are we not desperate?
So Daddy was saying, not to Mommy (who hadn’t come hiking with us but had stayed back at the picnic table with her typewriter) but to us, that there was no evil, but there was Heaven, if you kept in mind that Heaven wasn’t anything special or surprising; it might be just a hike along the shore, on a windy day, in late September; in itself not memorable, but the point is, if you can remember that we did this, we were here together, we stopped for lunch at Bay Point, even if it wasn’t a great lunch we were together, the five of us, no matter what happens afterward—this is Heaven. Got it, kids?
OK, Daddy, we said. It embarrassed us when Daddy spoke to us as to another adult, too seriously.
Y’know what, kids?—promise me you will scatter my ashes here after I die.
After I die. It is possible, none of us heard this.
A child does not hear die on a parent’s lips. No.
Of course we’d have said yes. Anything Daddy wanted us to say, we’d say, and anything Daddy wanted us to believe, we’d believe. Even if we had not a clue what Daddy was talking about this time as other times.
SPECIAL SURGERY