Chapter 11: Day Three: 5:47AM continued

A new day was imminent.

On the eastern horizon, light grey had been replaced with bands of bronze, orange and yellow. The barren landscape of Haleakala’s caldera absorbed the colors. Its boulders, crags and craters looked as if they had been painted by Peter Max or any of the psychedelic painters. Far off in the distance on the island of Hawaii the grey shadow of Mauna Loa emerged from the darkness. Below us was a sea of tied dyed puffy white clouds that obscured the ocean but gave a sense that you were standing in heaven or the very least Olympus. A place for the gods.

“It’s amazing Duke.”

From the shadows of the visitor’s center’s entrance my nephew replied, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

I turn to look at him. He was barely visible from where he stood. I said, “Thank you for this but I am still angry with you.”

“Why shouldn’t you be. I didn’t listen.”

I was not fine.

It seems so obvious now. Within three weeks of each other both your mother and best friend die. Two of the three people who formed the tripod of your support were gone. The people you turned to most for advice, comfort were dead and while Nadine,  the tent pole that held kept you upright remained, she was also six thousand miles away.

In normal times I would have distracted myself from my loss. But where could I hide? Newspapers, television and the internet were an endless flow of the death and despair of the Covid pandemic. The bulldozing of mass graves in Sao Paolo. The massive death of the elderly in institutions meant to care for them. Children trying to learn without school rooms and play with their friends while alone in their rooms. The blithe denial of science and fact from Donald Trump and his acolytes. Normal human contact has stopped. No office, no gym, no trips to the grocery. My only social engagement, if it happened at all, was walking Fennie, and waving at the other mask wearing members of the poop bag posse.

Life, took place on the flat screens of your computer, tablet, and phone. Zoom calls, Facetime and Skype were your only connections to the outside world and while they were godsends of technology, they contributed to a sense that reality was not a tangible thing. It only existed in your mind’s eye.

It had been a rough day.

It had started, as had so many days since my mother’s death, at my parent’s house. I would go there every day to work on the process of organizing the home in preparation for getting it sold. Most of the simple work had been done. Mom’s first edition book collection had been catalogued, boxed, and transported to my basement until we could decide on how to divide them among the three of us. Her clothes were gathered and delivered to the local Good Will organization. Items that had no value and were not desired by us were placed in a skiff we had placed in the driveway. That day, I had begun the process of going through the boxes, steamer trunks, and suitcases that contained thousands of family photographs.

My goal had been to identify what it is that we had before turning them over to Legacybox.com for digitization so we all could own our family’s pictorial heritage. I thought this would be a simple task. How hard is it to look at photographs, note what you have found, and repackage them? I had not factored in how emotionally raw I was from the death of mom, Con, and the disintegration of the world I knew and the lack of human contact. Every box I opened wore on my brittle psychological state whether they were pictures of my dad as a child in Vienna before the war, or my siblings and I in scenes common from any childhood like birthday parties, holidays, and life events such as bar mitzvahs, graduations, and weddings. All reminders of a simpler, better more humane world when the ones I loved were still here and hugs were only an ask away.

What finally had stopped me and put me into an emotional tailspin, was finding a scrapbook my then nineteen-year-old mother had put together about her and dad’s courtship. There was a picture of my twenty-three-year-old father smiling and looking like he belonged in GQ taken on the day they met. Playbills from shows they had seen together. Even a silly picture booth strip with each making silly faces at each other for the camera. But it was not a photograph that tripped my emotional circuit breaker. It was a Western Union telegram my Dad had sent Mom on the anniversary of their first meeting. It read “Hopelessly, ineluctable modality of the visible, auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive on September 5, 1948, plus one year. I miss you very very much. Hope we have many many more Love Zach.” It evoked my parents’ sixty-four-year journey together perfectly and left me desperate for just one more moment with them. It also sent me scurrying for the door as I could take no more.

Our townhome development was built on the site of a former farm directly adjacent to the Passaic River Park, a thousand acres of untouched woodland and river in the heart of suburbia. Trails meandered through the park and close to the river. It is where, as a boy, I would go on canoeing expeditions with the day camp I attended or go on short hikes with my father when he needed exercise or Mom ordered us out of the house. It is where Fenway and I would often ramble when the confines of the house became unbearable, or the day was too pretty to stay inside.

When I got home from my parents’ house, I decided what Fennie and I needed was a walk in the woods that still held the shadows of my childhood. It was a beautiful sun filled late summer day. The type of day mom would have described as positively Swiss as the oppressive heat and humidity of July and August had been replaced with an early glimpse of the fall. I thought exercise and the beauty of nature to help dim the sadness and sense of loss the photographs had created.

When we arrived at the park, I let Fenway off her lead so she could romp, play, and explore the woods at her own pace and interests. Strictly speaking, this was forbidden. But one of the few benefits of the pandemic was there were not a lot of people about to tsk tsk about these flagrant violations of the rules. When I heard other people, I called Fennie, she was never far away, and put on her lead so the folks I encountered were none the wiser. The trail we followed was one that shadowed the river’s bank. I found the flow of water soothing and relaxing and Fenway loved splashing in the shallows her joint heritage of Labrador and Poodle fully expressing itself.

Fifteen minutes into our walk just after Fenway had been for her third splash in the river I saw through the trees and the brush that lined the river bank a tall young man making his way on the trail in front of us. He was dressed oddly wearing a pair of khaki-colored shorts that resembled those worn by British forces during the second world war, a dark blue polo shirt and  brown ankle high hiking boots. He had a branch in his hands that he was using as a staff to help navigate the rougher parts of the trail. There was a familiarity to him I could not place. None the less I called to Fenway to “come” so I could put her back on lead.

Fennie is a good dog. She is smart and when you talk to her, which I do often, she looks at you with her dark brown eyes intent on understanding every word that you said. On occasion she would pause before obeying one of my “commands” as if processing whether my request was valid, but she always complied. This time she did not. Instead, she went bounding down the trail in hot pursuit of the man with the walking stick. I took off after her. After about a quarter mile the trail emptied into a small field with shoulder high grass which made it impossible for me to see my dog. In near panic, I picked up the pace.

Five minutes later, and in a state of near panic, I found her and the man sitting on a small concrete bench in a small grove of trees that overlooked a small rapids in the river. My bad dog was laying at the feet of the man, raspberry colored tongue hanging out looking incredibly pleased with herself. I was about to scold her when the man looked up at me and smiled. It was my father. Not the familiar dad of my childhood or even the one I had grown to know as a man during our journeys together. It was the twenty-two-year-old whose picture I had seen in my mother’s scrap book a few hours before.

It was disorienting. My father had been dead for over eight years. Had I lost my fragile hold on reality or was this something else? Whatever it was, young Pops was patting the bench next to him, a nonverbal request to join him.  Too stunned to do anything else I accepted and sat down. For a long while we did nothing but sit and watch the river. This could not be real. How could it be? It was likely a manifestation of my isolation and the sorrow I had managed to tuck away in a corner of my psyche for months. Or was it? I did not care. My father had always made me feel safe and loved. Nothing bad could happen if he was present and after feeling vulnerable. and alone for so long just sitting next to him, real or not, felt like I was just where I wanted to be.

I was comfortable in our silence. Over the years he and I had gone on adventures to Israel, Alaska, and Austria where we spent weeks alone with each other. When he got sick there were endless hours of sitting together often in silence. We knew each enough well enough that quiet did not bother us. I did not feel the world crushing me. The constant threat of Covid, ever present, was a shadow. Mom’s and Conor’s deaths,  as devastating as they were, lay easier with me. For the first time in months, I was at peace with the universe.

A male mallard duck with its gaudy yellow, blue, and green markings gently drifted by on the river and I turned to Dad and said “I never thought you would come back for a visit. When you died, I thought that there would be so much new to discover that you would set out to explore it all and never look back. I thought you would forget all about us.”

He turned his head and smiled and said, “Not possible.”

Trying in vain not to tear up I said “Thank-you.”

He remained smiling and impassive.  I knew this expression. He was saying I did not need to thank him. That is what you do for the ones you love. You show up. If you do that, everything else takes care of itself.

In the distance, I heard a dog barking. Fenway sat up in an alert pose, head pointed in the direction of the sound, ready to challenge any dog who came her way. I quickly bent over and snapped on her lead. When I looked up, Pops was gone.