Category: Memories

My debit card got hacked, probably from some unwise on-line activity, and I blocked my debit and credit cards for safety’s sake and cursed the world in which these thefts happen. Happily, my bank blocked all suspicious transactions (out in Californai), but I am left, at least for seven to ten days, without any plastic for a trip I was planning on taking down to Florida. I pulled cash out of the bank and went over to The Last Mile, a familiar place, to calm my aggravation and despair, pull things back into perspective and be diverted from that feeling that my life, in the short term, would be uncomfortable and complicated at the very moment I wanted to be at ease.

For some reason, The Last Mile is a good place to escape to — if one’s goal is the simple life, where cash is welcome, even preferred.

It was Friday, early into the new year and I stepped into the Mile around lunchtime, unusual for me. I rarely get there around lunch time. I was sad to see that the Christmas tree was gone. There were still some pine needles in that right-hand corner where it always goes up. There was still a HAPPY NEW YEAR greeting strung over the bar mirror. Life has resumed. There were about five people having either a hot dog or a burger.

The Mile is not known for its food, but owner Joe Barron (who flew back down to Miami this morning, probably on the same flight I was going to take) continues to give it a try from the 20×20 kitchen he added where there used to be a storage room. But he’s wisely continued to limited it to The Mile’s traditional fare of burgers and dogs. He just makes sure they’re good and that his cook buys only the best brands of beef and wieners and he only charges six bucks for them, with chips or fries.

Joe has to provide food under terms of the state Common Victualer’s license. State regulators don’t want people drinking without food available to follow it down and soak it up, although plenty of joints get away with it by just selling chips. Joe didn’t want his place to be such a joint. It would be a “family place”–with (some) food.

As I’ve probably told you in the past, Joe admits, when you happen to ask him, that he keeps this old establishment going sort of for sentimental reasons. But it’s a legend, this tavern with the seemingly ominous gloomy name and a reliable cast of characters dining and imbibing at any hour of the day or week. He owns the whole woodframe corner building. He’s got plenty of money, lives on the waterfront in Lynn when he’s not in Florida. The Last Mile is just one among his contributions to society and humanity, a warm place in life’s storm for some of the local world’s souls in search of comfort in the form of food, drink and community.

Joe’s cook is a young Hungarian-born guy named Andras who buys and cooks up his dogs and burgers and who lives in an apartment around the corner. Once upon a time, there was an unused old grill behind the bar, but that was an historical vestage from an earlier time — the early fifties when it was run by long-dead relatives of Joe Barron, catering to long-departed patrons who long-ago happily consumed dogs and burgers on the premises

Small kitchen, small menu — burgers, fries, fish sandwiches available on Fridays for the occasional Catholic still observing Friday abstinence. All the food goes in a big freezer that takes up a lot of the small kitchen space– big enough to handle the food supply adequate for a neighborhood establishment that doesn’t get a lot of lunch traffic.

But I know Joe has “food” dreams and would like to make his place famous for something you can eat there — some kind of special burger. He knows there’s a plain old sports bar in Norwood, Mass called Lewis’s and that it serves something called Lewis Burgers — I think it’s a fried egg on a burger.

I told Joe if he’s thinking about adding eggs, he should just serve breakfast.

“No, no, no. I don’t want Deano or anybody to have to open before daylight. This year, I’m thinking of getting my guy to make these Juicy Lucy burgers he keeps telling me about, stuffed with cheese. Can you imagine? And any kind of cheese you want.”

It didn’t send me, hearing Joe talk about it. I’m thinking of all the great and hopeful things I can dream about in the new year. A burger stuffed with cheese isn’t one of them.

As it was, I decided for the first time –believe it or not — to sample one of the Mile’s burgers, hand-shaped by Andres. My recent debit card misfortune was on my mind and I shared it with Deano, the bartender, who told me he’d been hacked once, too. He was going to let me put the burger and a ginger ale on a tab, but I paid from the wad of cash I had to withdraw from my bank to see me through until the new cards come.

* * * * * * * Anyway…enough about The Mile’s food history. * * * * * *

As I was downing my burger, Deano leaned in and said, “did you see who’s here? “

I thought I’d seen everybody who was there, but he indicated the guy we’d come to know only as Bill, sitting by himself at a table in the middle of the room. “Bill from Salem” is how we knew him. He had recently moved into the general area, was a salesman for a big international tech company and didn’t know many people. I’d seen him in The Mile just before Christmas and sat with him, just to be cordial. He’s a nice guy, but a bit of a mystery — like a lot of people who come into The Mile.

So, after I finished my burger, I picked up my ginger ale and went and sat with him again. (I think that was why Deano was pointing him out — he looked kind of lonely and a little exotic in the middle of the room that in the last fifteen minutes and welcomed about six chattering Revere city workers.

I greeted him and we chatted while he finished his burger and Micholob draft. We talked about the weather (up and down — lots of ice and snow recently, and rain), sports, a little politics, then he said something that froze me in my tracks. He said, “my wife backed down the driveway this morning. Gone, I guess, for good. Packed up everything of hers, and our five year marriage was over.”

I said, “Bill, I’m so sorry.”

“I appreciate that.” He sat back. “We moved here with the highest hopes.” He laughed. “I wonder if moving into the city of witches jinxed us.”

I assured him that was unlikely. But he wasn’t serious anyway. And he’d never said anything about his wife being a witch, or anything unpleasant. He hadna’t said much about her at all.

“I’m originally from Texas,” he said (I thought I detected an accent), lived in twenty-two places growing up. My work took me to cities around the world and I’ve lived in ten places in this country. Married seven times. This was number seven. Those women shared one or more of the houses in those ten places.”

“Some unlucky numbers, there,” I said.

“All numbers are unlucky for some people,” he said. “But you know what I’m seeing in my rear view mirror now, speaking, ah, ” metaphorically’, as it were.”

“What’s that?” I was keeping a tone of sympathy, mixed with an anticipatory sense that I was about to hear a piece of a life story, that I should be glad a near-stranger would trust me with, whether I wanted it or not .

My sense was right.”

“Driveways,” he said.

Driveways! Well, that was unexpected. I suppose in the Automotive Age, driveways have come to be important. (But, really? Driveways?)

Bill from Salem-by-way-of-Texas explained:

“Watching Terry (that must have been his most recently exiting wife’s name) —especially watching her back down the driveway –and I have a nice house with a nice long driveway – I thought how often I’ve watched a wife back down a driveway. Always had nice houses. they always had nice driveways. I usually drive a good car, got a new Lexus out there, parked around the corner.”

“Don’t want to leave it out there after dark,” I said.

“No, I’ve just stopped for lunch. I’ll be making some business calls and then I’ll be home to my empty house by the sea, and my single bed.”

I hadn’t meant to drop a bucket into that deep, sad well. I sipped my ginger ale.

“No,” Bill went on, I guess I have to asked what’s up with me. Always worked hard, done well, earned lots of money, met lots of women, fell in love often. But I’ll always have to look out a window, or stand at the top of a driveway and watch them–always having their own cars — back down the driveway and drive away.

“Oh, sure, there’s contact with them afterwards, over the phone or at a lawyer’s office — usually, anyway, not always — but that particular trip down the driveway, backing slowly down and away from me — and imaginging myself a disappearing figure in a window or at the top of that driveway, always wanting to watch, sometimes going down to the sidewalk or curb and actually watching their cars go out of sight — over the horizon as it were, I guess that’s the moment I feel my loss. Somehow I always want to see that trip down the driveway. It lets me ask myself — what went wrong?

. Of course, it’s never just one thing, it’s always lots of things, but then there is this one thing — seven women have decided they didn’t love me or I didn’t love them enough or the way they wanted to be loved and that my money, my looks.”

Looks? not, I guess they weren’t bad. Classically American, not Lynn/ Revere/East Boston ethnic or mediterranean. No, they were good, kind of blond nordic/ Scandanavian. He has blond/gray hair, a tall man, looking fit, probably has a gym membership…

“No, I make a good apperance, I’m pleasant. But the women all announce they’re leaving — and they leave. Down the driveway backwards they go. They’re rarely parked facing forward, so between glancing at the mirror and maybe occasionally looking up at me, the final act in the dram is this act of reversal. It’s all hope –the Mercedes or the Escalade, the Jaguar– or one time, believe it or not, it was a Rolls Royce! fading away. It’s the end. Hitting the road! Out of here!”

He drained the last of his draft beer. It occured to me that he was a guy who could have been drinking Chivas Regal. Deano had a bottle at the bar. But I guess this Bill was humbling himself among the plebs.

I asked: “You alright, Bill? There’s a priest that comes in here occasionally, or maybe you’d like a minister or a psychologist Believe it or not, the last time I checked, we had one of each. You don’t look Jewish, but if I’m mistaken, I know a rabbi who’s been in here at least once. Maybe the need to buy places without driveways, live in luxury high-rises. When they leave out of the garage below –hell, you’ll never see them. And the hell withthem!”

“Funny,” said Bill, and, regarding his emotinal health, “no, I’ll be fine. Been through it all before, the reversal. They drive in, they drive out.” He sat back. “Maybe it’s time for me to think about living alone.” He looked around. “Of course, I’ve been in here just one time before. It’s not my kind of place, usually. But I stopped in that first time because the traffic was backed up out front. I felt like a quick beer, the place looked respectable. Small and respectable. The bar tender, what’s his name?”

“Deano.”

“Deano! He was on duty that day, very friendly and welcoming. So I vowed I’d come back some day if I needed company and a little cheering up.”

“Well, I’m glad,” I said.”I’m Greg, by the way.” At last I introduced myself! He shook my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Greg. Thanks for letting me bend your ear.”

“Kind of tough,” I said, “finding yourself all alone in the middle of y our life with the holidays barely over.”

“Holidays kind of do it to me–or to the women,” he said. “A lot of my separations happen in January.”

All of a sudden, the woman named Molly Faraway was standing at our table.

Molly — have you met her yet? — i real friendly soul, divorced, brunette, maybe forty-seven-years-old, a veteran flight attendant based in Boston, originally from someplace in Rhode Island. And she’s pretty. No doubt about it. As I say, she was looming over us, smiling. She knew me slightly; knew my name, at least. “Hey, Greg,” she said, ” that your Lexus out there on the street?”

“No, you kidding, Molly? No,not mine. ” I indicated Bill. “This is the owner right here. Bill .” I turned to him. “You know, actually, Bill, I don’t know your last name.”

“Bill Harris,” Bill said, and suddenly stood up in a courtly manner and said to Molly, “Care to join us?”

Molly (last name Greeley), as it happened, had ended her shift, was holding a cocktail and was headed to join two fellow flight attendants at a table near where the Christmas tree had stood. I hadn’t seen them come in the side door where they often park (apparently near Bill’s Lexus). She explained how she was at the end of her shift, tired, just wanted a cocktail (looked like a rum and coke) and that her co-worker friends were over there waiting for her. whereupon Bill said, “then do you mind if I join you?”

And so he did. My last sight of him as I left — glancing first over at Deano behind the bar, who merely send a knowing look my way — was of Mister Bill Harris, properous but serially and now seriously lonely high-end traveling sales executive, seated with three flight attendants, all in uniform. And I wondered if one of them would become the next Mrs. Harris -and one day make her apperance backing down some future driveway somewhere in America where a man of Mr. Harris’s means would be likely to move her.

I walked down to the beach afterward, following a circuitous route, electing to walk down the winding little side streets, passing more than one houses having a short stub of a driveway of ancient broken pavement and macadam next to some humble woodframe working class soul’s domicile, sometimes with a dented and weatherbeaten car parked in it. These were driveways of ordinary people who probably rarely traveled but felt lucky to have a place to stow their cars when the snow piled up and the parking bans kicked in. Maybe there had been sad exits on these driveways, too, by men or women, husbands or wives, sons or daughters, bumping in reverse backwards down those mere ten yards or so, out into a cracked and narrow, over-familiar byway, shifting from reverse to drive — and driving off and away from the world or situation –or the person or persons — they were determined to leave behind.

Where. I mused, was the driveway in the heart of Texas that Bill Harris had backed down, probably at a tender age in his first care –some scarcely choice make-and-model he’d quickly outgrow — as he headed away from his world and into the world of corporate, monied isolation — in search of a wife ?

Sitting on a bench at Revere Beach, looking across cold sand peppered here and there with gull and pigeon feathers and the occasional cigarette butt — out at the cold blue winter Atlantic.

And I silently wished Mr. Bill Harris a Happy New Year.

Gaudate (Rejoice)

We wait. The seed is planted. It waits the winter and the spring rains. (James 5:8)

In the doorway of EddieDubuc’s old sandwich shop, corner of Neponset Ave and Pope’s Hill Street, shuttered and sealed up in plywood beginning early in the Sixties. (Don’t know if Eddie ran out of money, just got tired of running the place, or what. ) Waiting in the shallow shelter of Eddie’s old doorway for the MBTA bus to carry me to the rapid transit station at Field’s Corner, after which I had to disembark at either Andrew Square or Broadway and catch the City Point bus to a final bus stop — then walk a block…all due to the drab obligation of high school of which there are only scattered happy memories, just the daily filing into the grim, dark halls of the brick school, some of that time in the first two years being bullied — and, at the outset of this daily journey, coming out the front door of 210 Neponset, walking up that long neighborhood block every morning to that bus stop in front of vacant, abandoned Eddie’s lunch place. Only now remembering the one freezing winter morning cloistered in the doorway with a couple of adults, all of us jokingly bemoaning the necessity of waiting bundled up but still cold and in severe discomfort. It was about then a bus passed by, sadly not our bus, emblazoned on its side with an advertisement for travel to Florida, a long, tanned female , sun-glassed body reclined on bright sand. Laughter, one adult joking, noting the longed-for escape. (Does he live, as I do now, in Florida? Did Florida, often warm to another level of discomfort, prove to be The Second Coming of our humanity? Humbug! We still wait, for this cannot be all there is. Are those adults who shared that doorway with me still on this earth, or gone to the Judgement and, having waiting and hoped for it, gone to the sunny sands of a happly timelessness we simply cannot imagine?)

I wait now on the morning of Gaudate Sunday, being urged to be patient, wating for the seed planted in me to receive the winter and spring rains.

This James of the Bible, is said to be one of the ancient pillars of the new Church in Palestine, one of the many New Testament personages named James. (Can I call him Jim? Was there a Jim standing in that doorway with me that cold morning? Was I laughing with a prophet?) This James (Jim) was, we’re told, an administrator, not the Apostle James. Some guy who knew a lot of good stuff and, all through the ages, is telling us to WAIT. BE PATIENT, while trying to be good, faithful, worthy, all that. Easy for him to say — or have said.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

They will light a rose-colored advent candle today.

Hope. We wait….burning, like that little flame….

This date is, incidentally, many things, sacred and mundane — the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Frank Sinatra’s birthday.

But it is, most especially, the birthdays of my twin brothers Ronald and Douglas. I must note that fact, for it is very much on my mind.

Ron is extremely ill and infirm with Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Winthrop, Mass, near in to Boston, the airport and all things north of the heart of the city.

Doug has lived for decades in Denver. I’m happy to say he is healthy.

Happy birthday, Twinnies. (“Twinny is what Ron’s and Doug’s boyhood playmates and companions were given to calling them from time to time. They were identical.

They are a major part of my life. I pray Ron will gain enough health and strength to be able to get home from the rehab in Woburn, Ma. and enjoy life. I pray Doug remains healthy.

There are narrow winding lanes of tiny shops in the Port’s center. The chocolatier has a fan above his door that sends the aroma of freshly baked fudge out into the open air. He sells ice cream, too; homemade. From the other ceramic, dress and novelty shops, especially the quiet, sequestered ones along the winding lanes, away from the busy little main street (called Myrtle Avenue), there comes the scent of patchouli, citrus and lavender, often the piped strains of guitar or harp music. You might find a busker working away at his guitar or flute on one of the little alley turns over near the water’s edge. People stop to listen. It’s busy in summer. (I noted the license plates of distant visitors.)

And then immediately south of the short row of scollop and shrimp boat docks, there is the fresh sea scent blowing in off Lucian Inlet and the view of the open ocean beyond. There is a small park, a mere patch of greenery at the water’s edge with two sugar maples for shade and benches for the foot-weary tourists and those town residents who make a point of gathering here daily, like the women’s knitting circle and some men who bring a folding table for daily games of chess. There is a small garden and a monument statue of angels at the heart of the park and at the heart of a lovely fountain. For those sitting on the few nearby benches, looking out toward the sea, there is always the gentle sound of water plashing over stone and falling into the tiny pond below. People have tossed coins into the pool. A brass placque by the pond’s edge tell you the fountain was dedicated to a long departed benefactor in 1958. A wooden sign rising up from a stake thurst into the brown garden mulchtells you in Olde English lettering that the flowers are watered and the whole garden maintained by the Port Lucian Garden Club.

For forty years, Mercy Strange has had her little art gallery halfway down Periwinkle Lane in the Port shopping district. For years, she had worked in oils, acrylics and watercolors and still displays and sells those old legacy works in her cramped but cozy space. But, sometime early in this century, she switched to working in charcoal. She said it was the light in Port Lucian that made her make that shift — a peculiar change, no question, just to work exclusively in black and gray, drawing what in real life are colorful landscapes and seascapes and, now and then, she will generously draw portraits on-the-spot of some of the people who approach to watch her work at her easel those days she goes to the park.

It seems odd to be turning everything gray in such a colorful, charming world.

I asked her about the change. She said it was the light that she sees over everything — she insists the light at Port Lucian is gray. Now, everyone else saw sunlight, although there were certainly gray days when clouds rolled over the coastline beyond the bluffs, or when winter came and the occasional snow cover would turn gray –or slushy- icy silver– on the sidewalks and in the otherwise clean gutters, and on those especially frigid days when ice would form on the masts of the fishing fleet.

But to Mercy, the whole Port, where she has lived all here 69 years, had become gray in every season. It was a singular and curious evolution in her artistic vision. It baffled many of us.

Gray light at Port Lucian: That was the name of her last exhibit in February.

Gray had become Mercy’s color of choice.

She also said the village, indeed, the whole world (according to her gray vision) had become more and more gray, crass, mercenary and materialistic as the days and summers and every season, bright or gray — even Christmas, all red and green and draped with holly — came and went and came again in Port Lucian and in the universe.

She was not specifically speaking of famine or disease or pandemic or war are political termoil. She was speaking of –well, of death. Life and death, and all the gray in between.

Some of us thought she might have suffered an ocular, or specifically, a macular degeneration that was effecting her physical vision.. But she assured us that was not the case. In fact, unlike many of her age –she is 69 — she is still gifted with 20/20 eyesight. We know this because, sensing our suspicions regarding her health claims, she showed a few of us the results of her eye examination. Yes, she was 20/20.

I see Mercy on my frequent trips to The Port. Her world has been in deep charcoal gray going on fifteen years now. I’ve been wondering about that. About Mercy, and the Gray Light….What emotional or mental — or, still I wonder if it is not physical — factors have altered her view of the world. Surely, over that period, times have been good or bad. Good and bad can be rendered in color or in black and white — or gray. Gray is more somber, more ambiguous for certain. Many of life’s circumstances seem gray. Of course, when as many movies were in black and white as in color, we did not necessarily feel our mood dampened. Those were often the filmmaker’s economic decision. Often, but not always. There is a quality rendered by black and white which color cannot convey, not to mention what gray conveys.

Mercy reminded me that DaVinci worked extensively in charcoal, including in his famous study of hands. German artist Kathe Kollwitz used charcoal to express the struggles of the working class and the horrors of war.( It was to Kollwitz’s work that her growing body of work was most often compared.) John Singer Sargent certainly let earth tones prevail on his canvasses.

So, Mercy Strange is not unique. But it was still peculiar or (forgive me) strange that she so seemingly abruptly shifted from a colorful vision of the world to a gray one.

So most of us who consider ourselves friends, patrons and supporters of Mercy Strange had accepted her shift, invited the art media to highlight her growing body of gray and black (but mostly gray) work. I personally bought one of her charcoal drawings of crows gathered on a bare and dying oak tree on the bluff at the entrance to the inlet. She called it, in complete accuracy, “A Murder of Crows,” for that is how such a gathering is known in the avian lectionary.

All well and good. Meanwhile the quaint, colorful and charming life of the waterside village known as Port Lucian continued, the coffers of her merchants rising and falling as the national economy rose and fell,buffeted by seas of contemporary political overtures, advances and retreats.

But six months ago, the skies seemed to darken to the edge of her twelve-by-twelve mile borders. Yet there are no clouds overhead, but the sky nonetheless seemed a deep gray. It is as if clouds dissolve the second they drift into The Port’s airspace but the sky remains gray for no known atmospheric reason, or so those who beheld this phenomenon declared.

But was it just Mercy’s mood spreading — or do we all, from time to time, even for long periods, see nothing but gray? But Mercy above all seemedd to be seeing nothing else.

It was about then that people really began to take note of Mercy Strange sitting with her easel, and sometimes sitting without any easel or drawing implements — sitting among the rocks bordering the inlet.

She would sit there for hours on end. Finally one day, I made my way out there along the waterfront road, parking my car at the base of the rocks where there was a scattering of teenage grafitti defacing the pervasive beauty. (There is always a bit of blight scattered about the world — but, of course, the reality is — there is a whole lot of it.)

I found the path Mercy must have followed through a few scrub pine and then onto the rounded, bare, sometimes slippery rock surface until I saw Mercy sitting there…

She was sitting before her easel, but she was not drawing. Her hands were by her side. She was staring out to the open water. She’d apparently set up her easel out of habit. But her canvas was empty.

I approached….I don’t think she knew I was there. She was briefly startled when I said, “hello, Mercy.”

She looked at me, standing now on the precarious rock surface to her right. I smiled. She said, “sit here for a moment, rest, though, I’m sorry I do not have another chair.”

I sat down on the rock, drew my legs up. Her folding chair was low to the rock surface. “It’s coming soon,” she said.

“What — what’s coming soon?” I said.

“The cloud,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s sort of like …..I saw this film as a child. Perhaps you saw it, too. Husband and wife along on a boat on the open water, obviously unhappy in ways you or I would not yet understand as children. The wife goes below on the small boat, the husband suddenly notices a cloud approaching on the surface of the water.”

“I think I recall this movie,” I said, “from a Saturday matinee. It made me have my first bout of juvenile depression. At least that’s how it felt. As I recall, the cloud makes the man shrink away to nothing – in a black and white movie about a black and white…and gray…world.”

“But not,” Mercy reminded me,” before he falls victim to the family cat he’d once loved so much — and, escaping to the basement where he lives inside a match box but is attacked by a spider — a small spider that, in his new universe, is a giant, hideous monster…”

Thought the breeze on the rocks was gentle, I was getting a chill. “Yeah, you’re bringing it all back,” I said.

“And he shrinks and shrinks — to an atom, alone.”

“And his wife and everybody think he was eaten by the family cat.”

“Yes.”

“Enough,” Mercy. Have mercy…” and I chuckles.

And, from here on out reader — well….the revery, the vision, the revelation, the necessary human act of understanding, of comisseration, of vicarious participation in another’s invisible suffering…. the what-have-you…

for…Mercy suddenly said to me, with great urgency…

“Look,” and I looked out where she was pointing beyond what boats were visible on the water, including a tanker far out toward the horizon. It was a consoling, beautiful scene. But she was pointing to a low-lying cloud.

“Mercy,” I said. “That’s just a cloud.”

“Yes,” she said, but clouds have been coming ashore for months now, gray clouds. In my life, anyway. How about yours?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I started to say.

“And you haven’t seen the clouds gathering out there, getting ready to push ashore?”

“I listen to the weather forecast,” I said. “Clouds come and go…”

“No clouds in your forecast?” she said, looking at me again, then out to sea — toward whatever cloud she was seeing.

“I haven’t seen any,” I said, meaning clouds – or, at least, clouds or a cloud of the kind she seemed to be suggesing; an ominous cloud. The kind of cloud that could turn the world gray, change our climate, within and without. We’ve all known such clouds. “I’ve been here every weekend,” I said with redoubtable optimism,” and sometimes during the week. I love it in the Port, I come here often, as you know. We have had nothing but sunny skies…and the world here is — colorful.”

But then, I noticed the air suddenly growing hazy. I turned and looked toward the sea, but a fog –or was it a cloud — had suddenly, mysteriously, engulfed us. I could barely see Mercy right next to me. I was suddenly terrified. What was going on? I looked back toward the village. It, too had vanished from sight. The rocks were suddenly moist and slippery.

“Mercy,” I said. “Are you there? What is happening,” as if she would know. I put my hand out toward her, and touched — nothing, not her not her easel, nothing.

She was gone…

After a solid two minutes, paralyzed by my utter bafflement, I carefully rose, crawling first, then standing once I was sure I would not slip off the rocks into the bay. My heart was pounding, for I wondered, was this a dream? A very bad dream?

I made my way back down between the patches of green to where there was dry earth and pebbles underfoot. I fumbled out my car keys, but all the while wondering — had I left Mercy up there? Had SHE somehow slipped silently into the inlet’s waters? But, no, she was gone. I looked about for her small old Volvo, but then recalled that it hadn’t been there when I arrived. Mercy was known to walk all the way out to the point.

The haze was all about me now. Yet, it was nothing I could breath. It seemed somehow–artificial, as if my sight merely needed to adjust to the condition and it would vanish. I backed up and, careful that no cars were coming around the bend, started slowly through the haze back toward the village along the waterside road.

Then, as if things were not terrifyingly disorienting enough, I suddenly emerged from the fog and the villeage was spread out before me at less than a mile’s distance….but….in nothing but gray tones….gray, black and ghastly white.

And as I drew slowly closer to the town, the distant prospect of collected, charming cluster of roofs and windows of shops did not enlarge. The whole scene stayed as small as it might seem from a mile away….

And beyond anything I’d ever experienced before came the moment I arrived on the road that had shrunk to a black two-in line and I was driving on dirt and along the waterfront was a collect of dollhouse and toy boats where there had been a full village.

And no people, large or small. I was alone. No birds, no signs of life — just a former world diminished to a toy store’s display of a village by water, that was suddenly just a pond and continuing to shrink…I had not noticed that my car had disappeared from around me. It was at below, between my feet. I went to pick it up — and the ring fell off my finger. And I was……shrinking, and was, all at once, on a wide desert where all but the burning sands were vanished. But Mercy Strange was coming toward me, slowly -smiling wistfully.

And she said, in greeting, “You know now what I have been feeling. Do they call it depression? Whatever they call it, I’ve been trying to paint it, draw it — a world gray and shrinking until there is no place for me…..

And then I woke on a bench along the village’s Myrtle Street — all restored, color life, people all around and I sitting in the cool sunlight under a chestnut tree….and I could see Mercy Strange sitting in the break between the low, charming building….sitting in the park by the shrimp boats and the bay leading out to the sea, people and flowers all around her. She was drawing…no, she was painting in bright colors. That much I could see – the colors. I rose and at the first break in the mild summer traffic, I crossed and walked toward her.

Yes, Mercy, you are back, I thought. But I must tell you of my dark vision……that, for so many years had been your lonely, crushing vision….

The cloud has lifted. The Light is shining in

Time passing. Time captured. For what little it’s worth.

But all our life’s times are worth something.

And I’m thinking of one captured moment in a life in which even uneventful moments should count. :

A restless, idle, solitary Sunday afternoon; my age (just an estimate) thirteen, circa 1960; home alone (where was everybody?), feeling as if I should be somewhere, doing something, anything; too young to be so idle, so bored, so anxious, moving around the house, but mostly just staying in my own room that had been my sister’s room until she was married and moved out in June, 1959. This therefore was probably early spring of 1960. Or maybe not.

I’m ust guessing, of course. it could have been 1961, 62, even 63. And I could have been 14,15,16…It all runs together, and that detail is lost.

But it must have been early spring, based on the little thing that happened that made it memorable. The ground was bare, the sun was shining. It wasn’t cold, barely even a little chilly — which is why what was to happen was so unusual, which is also what makes us remember things in an otherwise ordinary day.

I’m not sure why I turned the TV on, or why I didn’t turn it off if I wasn’t interested in what was on, which I wasn’t.

This I remember: Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman were in Paris. War was threatening. The movie, from 1948, was called Arch of Triumph, after the Paris monument. That’s a good a name for a movie or a monument, nes pas? Or a novel. The movie, I now know, was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who also wrote All Quiet On The Western Front

All was quiet — too quiet — on my adolescent front that Sunday afternoon.

But, upon reflection, this might be one of those early instances, beyond childhood and at the edge of adulthood, when one suddenly knows enough to be anxious and disatisfaction with their idleness, because there was a life to be lived, and, like it or not, responsibilities to be assumed.

Reality.

I know that, for a sustained period, for no reason, I just sat looking out the window — out over the backyard, over neighbors’ rooftops and, between the houses, at the empty supermarket parking lot. (It was closed Sundays in those days.) There were some trees here and there, leaves probably just appearing.

Then, suddenly…..

large snowflakes began swirling in the briefly darkened sunlight. It was the thinnest, briefest of snow squalls — over almost instantly without leaving a white trace anywhere on the ground. It came on like a mid-Sunday, early spring revery, perhaps unforecasted, perhaps confined to my neighborhood, perhaps even just to my backyard, just for my vision. But it was real; probably the fleeting product of a small, drifting cloud; a very localized meteorlogical anomaly.

Did anyone else — anyone in my neighborhood or anyone else anywhere see it?

And had that squall not happened, I’d have never remembered that otherwise undistinghished afternoon, that moment in that empty, languid Sunday in that empty house where I’d lived all my short life to that point.

And, for what it was worth, I feel certain I never would have recalled what movie was playing on television.

Just before or just after the squall, I became aware that the movie was reaching its sad denoument.

Pre-World War II  Paris is crowded with illegal refugees, trying to evade deportation. Charles Boyer is one Dr. Ravic, practicing medicine illegally under a false name, helping other refugees. He saves Joan Madou, played by Ingrid Bergman, from committing suicide after the sudden death of her lover. She and Ravid (Boyer), of course, become lovers, but as the movie ends, he is being deported. Ingrid as Madou must say a sad goodbye.

Charles Boyer is waiting in the deportation line with his friend, Boris, who predicts they’ll both spend time in a concentration camp but bids him an affectionate farewell. They both promise to meet at the famous bar called Fouquet’s after the war...

One could only hope so.

Drama, Romance, Make-Believe , always bracketed by Reality….and Time.

In the last shot of the film, the camera travels through Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Arch of Triumph. )May we all triumph over life.

And because snowflakes fell in sunlight one very idle, ordinary early spring Sunday afternoon sixty-five years ago –an ordinary moment during the running of an otherwise ordinary and forgettable movie (which flopped at 1948 box offices) was made memorable. Preserved for what little it was worth…. in Time.