I had planned on leaving for Asia the previous weekend, but after a long phone call with Todd Shigekane, I decided to bus north and visit Michael's grave as well as my grieving mother. She had lost her baby son. His birth on December 7, 1960 was clear in my head. Thirty-five years ago. I had sublet my apartment for six months to Paul Brissman, a young Swedish photographer. I rode the Chinatown bus north to Boston.
My mother cried upon seeing me at South Station. My father bore his sorrow inside. Like me we were true New Englander. Emotions ran cold in our veins. Our mutual pain was was not to shared in private or public. I wanted to say that I remmember him driving into the school on that cold Pearl Harbor day to tell us about the arrival of our baby brother. He said nothing on the ride up to Maine. We were spending the weekend on Watchic Pond in Standish. It was a family ritual. The camp belonged to my sister and his husband, I slept on the bottom bunkbed. Everything was so familiar; the tall pines, Italian sandwiches, the tannin tainted water, the loons, my Aunt and Uncle. Shutting my eyes i saw my grandmother across the pond and only two years ago swimming in the Saco River with Michael.
My father drove the Olds 88 fast, almost as if he were fleeing the past or the future without his youngest son. When Michael had been unable to walk, my farher carried him to his radio show ONE IN TEN.
I had hoped for him to make it another year or two. He had been on experimental AIDS meds, only his were a placebo. Some of his friends had survived the scourge. Not my brother.
I wished I had gone insitead of Michael, but my mother couldn't surive the loss of another son, so I'm determined to live into the next century.
Until then it was time to soak in the soul of Maine.
The smell of the camp, canoes, the faint stench of the SD Warren paper mill, the Casco Bay, losters, soft shouldered roads, pine cones and the Saco River running to the sea. .
No comments:
Post a Comment