Vic Socotra

20 June 2009

Half Way There

(Little Traverse Bay at Sunset)

Walt Whitman may have it best, since this is a bittersweet time. There are other voices, of course, but I rely on Walt for a lot. For those of you that have passed this way before, you know, and those who have not will know soon enough. I am half way, just as we approach the solstice, the longest day of the year tomorrow, with the long slide through summer into the darkness of the Fall to come, losing a minute or two each day.

Mom just turned 85; for another month, she will share the age with Dad, until he turns 86 in August.

I don’t know quite what to think this morning. I will let another do it for me. Angry Dylan Thomas is not the voice I heard. There is no raging at the dying of the light in this journey, rather we seem to be going gently into that good night.

Safe again at home between the monster storms, I floated in the late afternoon sun and contemplated the week. It was the usual hurtle back and forth the length of the great state of Michigan; before I figured out how the satellite radio worked on the Ford Focus I rented after landing at Detroit, I heard that unemployment had hit 14.1% in the former motor city, an if you included those who had given up looking altogether, it would actually be around 20% of the employment–aged work force that was out of a job.

There were little signs of it everywhere, and particularly up in tourist country. Everything is for sale or rent, and the crowds were quite manageable. The service, always spotty in the summer rush, was remarkably solicitous in the restaurants.

It was a good week. I cooked and fixed things- voyage repairs, if I was to use the old nautical term for what we did when the great ship pulled into port and the irritating little things that cannot be fixed underway can be triced up and put right.

It went pretty well. Mom and I sang a lot, and Dad smiled at the sound. There was a slight mistake on the outward journey, just past halfway done in the visit. I had intended to drop Dad at his exercise class at the Senior Center, and brought the large exercise bal that the people sit on, and turn and bounce.

The trainer was there- he looked like a biker, with the bottom half of a Fu Manchu moustache on and his wife was there, too, with bright eyes, telling me she had five strokes.

“Bill,” said the trainer to my father, “You know Wednesdays are the day that we bring our balls. Today is stretching and loosening.” Dad looked at him blankly. I blushed, since I had but that ungainly inflatable device in the backseat on top of my bags. Mom had crafted a nice fabric bag to conceal the wrinkled surface that made it resemble a giant dodge-ball.

It was my fault, I was trying to remember too much for Dad; he might have told me; it was possible, after all.

I drove back own the hill to return the ball to the garage. I meant to tell Mom about the mistake, but after I shouted for her at the house, realized she was either in the shower or in her chair reading one of the books she completes each day to keep her mind in shape, a printed version of Dad’s big dodge ball.

I put the ball in its place on top of the files and assorted junk that needs to be separated from the stuff of value and memory, since that is what is needed now. Then I returned to the rental car in the drive, climbed in, and drove back up the large hil out of town, the glittering waters of Little Traverse Bay at my back.

Old Walt Whitman said it pretty well, I thought, as I turned up the satellite radio and rolled down the window to blast the three hundred miles south to the airport, hoping I had built enough cushion into the morning to arrive on time and would not be driving maniacally across Washtenaw and Wayne Counties at the end to try to make the rental bus and clear security and catch the tram to the gate.

I’m half-way in all this, having gotten the kids launched only to discover the folks drifting back in to shore. Walt nailed it.

“Youth, large, lusty, loving-youth full of grace, force, fascination,

Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action,
ambition, laughter,

The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
restoring darkness.”

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