One autumn night, I went to a 12-step meeting at the local prison. I hope my presence is of some use at a place like that. I’ve spent no real time in jail, not even a whole night, just some metaphorical spanking for civil rights or anti-war protests. Whatever group of demonstrators I’d joined must have struck the authorities as not worth their trouble. But whenever I visit a correctional facility, I shiver at the clang of a steel door behind me.

 

I rode home from the meeting with my friend Stanley. Stan, a mason, is my age but physically twice as strong, I’m sure; likewise his emotional strength. I’d put his height at about 5’9”, and his weight at 250-plus, not a pound of it hanging. He’s foursquare, solid as a Vermont granite block, the sort he hefted around for decades.

 

Stan escaped some lethal habits a half a century ago, a great thing for him but for others too. His reckoning came after he broke a fellow drunk’s jaw. It all started with a minor insult: noticing my friend’s tendency to cross his eyes when drunk, the guy on the next barstool asked if the tears ran down his shoulders when he cried. Stan told him no, he never cried, period, but he was about to offer something to cry about himself. Stan ended up in jail– but for the last time. “So far,” he’s always adds.

 

When you shake Stan’s hand, you know that, even in his eighties, he could still do a lot of damage with those mitts. But the idea of his getting into a drunken brawl is almost unimaginable. Nowadays, he’s the soul of gentleness and restraint. 

 

An inmate at the jailhouse gathering had spoken of his struggles with a gambling addiction, which prompted the rest of the conversation on our way back in Stan’s truck. The man with the betting habit said he wanted out of his ruinous life–what there was of it. He’d lost wife, children, job, car, home. 

 

I’d heard identical tales before, but not from any gambler, and it puzzled me that something other than a drug or a drink could have consequences like ones faced by people with alcohol or drug habits. It wasn’t like gambling could apply a bodily grip. I asked Stan whether he could identify with the man’s gambling compulsion, and he answered that he didn’t think he’d get hooked on betting but didn’t plan on experimenting, because he’d encountered quite a few people in his longtime sobriety who’d gone through gambler’s hell and landed in a place like the one we’d just left. Or else they died. At least this poor addict was still alive. 

 

Like drinking or drugging, Stan told me, the catastrophic gambler begins in a seemingly harmless way: maybe a few bucks bet with a friend on a local high school game, the prize a slice of pizza, a beer, whatever. 

 

Then, euphoric at winning some small wager, he begins to seek higher stakes, maybe a college game or some regional horse race. He doesn’t yet recognize any trouble, let alone disaster, looming, but the stakes keep getting higher. The regional horse race becomes the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness, the college ballgame becomes the NFL Super Bowl, and so on, each venture requiring a bigger outlay. 

 

“The worst thing,” Stan said, “is a little success, maybe a hundred back on a ten-buck wager.” 

 

Sure enough, the guy at the prison described to the group how he once won a bundle by putting money on some long-odds driver in a big NASCAR event. He couldn’t remember which race, let alone the name of the hero. “My big luck never shows up now, though,” he admitted. “Don’t matter what I’m betting on.” He told us he’s always convinced himself that a change in his fortunes lay right around the corner. That conviction among actively addicted people is common to the point of banal: like the guy with the betting compulsion, the drunk and the junkie get a glimpse of what they’re doing to their lives but they figure something will come along to reverse their predicaments.

 

For the gambler, as for substance abusers, things will go south, maybe slowly, maybe abruptly. There’s perhaps a stretch of tardy bill-paying, and when someone, usually a spouse, asks him for explanation, he comes up with a plausible justification: an unexpected, costly furnace repair, a child’s orthodontic expenses, a set of new snow tires. He may even believe, or at least half-believe, these ruses himself.

 

Or perhaps his partner notices some unusual withdrawals from their joint bank account and from various ATMs, or unfamiliar debts appearing on a shared credit card. Again, the incipient addict dreams up some explanation, but, just so his partner won’t worry, of course, he secretly opens a personal account at a different bank, its monthly statements to be mailed to his work address. And he gets another card that shows his name only. 

 

Such tactics don’t hold up. Sooner or later, someone– out of friendship or, in the case of family, fear of financial chaos– confronts the gambler with his problem. Early on, and in many sad cases for good, the addict’s response tends to be the same: full of self-righteous resentment, he barks, “I don’t have a problem!” and, inevitably, “I can quit whenever I want!”

 

So he does. He quits. Like a drunk going white-knuckle dry for a time, he swears off betting for a week, a month, even a year or more. And then, having “proved” he’s able to resist gambling’s  hold on his soul, he begins again, resolving that this time he’ll behave differently, that he’ll go back to his original just-for-fun, penny-ante stuff. 

 

He proposes some rules for himself: one bet a week, say, and not to exceed ten dollars, and he may stand firm for a spell. But his compulsion is patient. It knows he’ll soon enough bend those rules. Just this once, the gambler will pledge, pushing his limit from ten dollars to fifteen, maybe, or placing a second bet within a single week. Just this once… The downward spiral starts  all over again.

 

“It’s just like you and me said, I’ll only drink after five o’clock,” Stan observed, “or I’ll have one can of beer and that’s that. We both know how that story ends.”

 

Having surrendered, however gradually, to his old ways, the gambler discovers that the addiction’s even more powerful than before. Things get worse, though he doesn’t fully recognize as much even now. He’ll have a thought like, “Okay, I do gamble too much, but…” That but can take all sorts of shapes. Eventually, the gambler concludes, “Okay, I overdo it. But the only person I’m hurting is me.” But often he has a wife and children, so this delusion may be his last before he either addresses his fatal dependency or else he loses his life, either literally or metaphorically, a life now well beyond his own control. The bet is in charge of him now, in the same way that booze or smack rules its slaves.  If funds get short, he may resort to thievery, which is what had stuck this fellow in stir at last.  

 

After Stan dropped me off, I stood a while in the dooryard, pondering our conversation. I’d known people who strained Sterno through a sock and drunk it, a lot more who got wasted on Listerine or some other alcohol-containing mouthwash, even on aftershave. I’d heard one ex-con in recovery from drugs say, “I loved the junk, but I loved the spike too.” He explained in a meeting how he once boiled mayonnaise until a skim of oil came to the top, filled a needle with the goo, and shot it into a vein. “Started floppin’ around like a chicken with its head chopped off,” he admitted. Then he added, “I lived to tell you about it. A lot of ‘em wouldn’t. God done that.  I don’t know what else you’d call it.” 

 

In short, I’d seen or gotten word of some truly mind-boggling instances of addicts’ behavior, but for whatever reason the prisoner we’d heard from that night was the first life-destructive gambler I’d ever heard from. 

 

I never saw the man again, I’m sorry to say, though I went back to the same jail some six months later. Of the handful of prisoners Stan and I met and who were still doing time had any idea where the poor gambler went. Perhaps he moved to another part of the state or the country, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn he’d tried some equivalent to the mayonnaise injection, even if I can’t quite picture what that would look like. He may not have come through with similar luck to the ex-con’s, the one who’d lived through that insane injection.

 

People who are themselves unsusceptible to addiction often sermonize, ascribing any self-devastating behavior to a lack of willpower or morals or both. The less judgmental simply tend to be baffled. One of my dearest friends, for instance, said of his alcoholic brother, “Why won’t he just screw the top back on his fucking vodka? If I were doing something I knew was killing me, I’d stop doing it. I mean, do you know any diabetics who hit the grocery store so they can suck up a pound of sugar?” I couldn’t explain the mysterious, deadly paradox to him; I’ve never found the right words, likely because none exist in the end. People drink because they drink, use because they use, and, evidently, gamble because they gamble. No ethical or psychological explanation I’ve ever heard has proposed more precise motives.

 

The plain fact is that heartbreakingly few addicts ever recover, because too few are blessed– and I use the word advisedly– to find total despair and then, more crucially, to decide for themselves they want a way up and out. No blandishment from others, no legal morass, no humiliation, no physical harm will turn the tide unless the sufferer concludes on his own that he needs to change. He must also recognize that his resolve has met with daily failure and that he needs help. This is the crux of twelve-step programs, after all: you’re just whipped, so you need to ask how a  person gets right from people who’ve been where you are and, with a lot of assistance from their predecessors, have found an escape.

 

That evening, after Stan’s taillights flickered out in the distance, I suddenly noticed the crystalline, star-freckled sky, and I thanked God, or whatever it was, that I could be there to marvel at its splendor. I likewise thanked people like Stan for helping me break my own chains many years back. 

 

The gambler at the jail had been a real mess, chalk-complexioned, gaunt, howling like a newborn. For whatever reason –it made me squirm– he kept pulling on his right earlobe until I thought he’d do himself bodily harm. Now and again, he’d bolt up where he sat to pace around behind our circle of chairs, all the while incoherently muttering vituperation at the fellowship’s terse slogans, which were temporarily taped to a wall. 

 

“Easy does it?” he spat at one point. “Gimme a break!” And later, “One day at a time?” how the hell else does anybody live?” 

 

Stan quietly advised him to keep an open mind: “Remember,” he advised, “your own best thinking got you here.”

 

Picturing the gambler later, I added to my general gratitude the fact that I tended not to react the way that fellow did to things I didn’t like. I was thankful too that at least I hadn’t piled his addictive urges onto my own. I didn’t seem to have it in my character to place a bet, couldn’t even imagine how it felt like to be possessed by betting.

 

Then something occurred to me in a flash, something that had always amused me before, and truthfully still does, no matter my inner laughter’s more qualified since that jail meeting and the conversation with Stan riding home. Just under a quarter-century ago, I taught for a semester at a college in the Ticino, Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton. Our family lived in a little town near Lugano, and for a good portion of our time there, my wife –on leave from her court mediator’s job– home-schooled our youngest. The Swiss tend to be xenophobic, so we were having a real struggle to get her into a communal grade school. Ultimately, we had to enroll her in a Steiner school as a last resort, which turned out to be a gift: she thrived there, learning basic Italian that she still commands, making friends, developing unpredicted skills.

 

As for me, I quickly found my own gift at the college.  One of my English department colleagues was an Irishman, also a writer, a good one, and it felt we’d known each other for years. I can’t recall how the subject should even have arisen, but one day at lunch I learned from him that in Ireland and in the UK, where he attended the University of Birmingham, the card game we call Blackjack goes by the name of Pontoon. One evening at home, I mentioned this, whereupon that same youngest daughter asked what the game’s rules were. Though I’d rarely played Blackjack, having no interest whatever in cards, I was able to teach her. 

 

At ten years old, that beloved girl would for inscrutable reasons sometimes affect a 1940s gun moll’s manner of speech and gesture. Almost every night, about an hour before bed, she’d arch an eyebrow, look at me out of the corner of an eye, and growl, “Pontoon?” Out came the deck. I’ll shortly reveal why she became so fond of our competition. 

 

A bit of back-story. The refrigerator in our rented house was small for my wife and me, a son and daughter enrolled in the local post-elementary American school, and our little card sharp. On Friday mornings, after home lessons were over and I was off teaching, the youngest would accompany her mom across the Italian border to shop for groceries. Afterwards, they’d stop for a pastry and a cioccolata densa, a hot chocolate drink so thick it looked like a melted candy bar. In the interim, my wife would give our daughter a couple of francs and let her wander around the toy shop just across the street from the market. 

 

On the first few visits, the girl sometimes bought Kinder Joys with trifling toys inside, but at least as often, she’d merely look around and then come find her mother. As time went by, though, my wife noticed she’d begun to fetch home some more elaborate purchases– sets of Legos, dolls, stuffed animals, so on. When asked how she could afford such luxuries, that canny daughter rightly pointed out that things were a good deal cheaper in Italy than in Switzerland, and that, having saved up her unspent francs and the small allowance we gave her each week, these things now lay within her reach.

 

Our daughter deployed this deception simply because my wife had forbidden us both to play Pontoon for money. We could play for swapped chores, for time when she could rollerblade at the little park uphill from our house, for a gelato, but never for cash. Frankly, however, part of the kick my daughter and I got out of our games resided in our mischievous defiance of her mother’s injunction.

 

I’ll cut to the chase. To this day, I can’t explain it. I was almost fifty years older than that little girl. She was in grade school, and I’d earned a Ph.D. in  Comparative Literature. Yet for every hand of Pontoon I won, I’d lose six. Often, I lost every last one. We’d limit ourselves to twelve hands, the winner getting half a Swiss franc, and because we played almost nightly and because I kept getting trounced, our daughter usually owned a fair chunk of change by week’s end. 

 

After a month or so, our subterfuge somehow came to light, I think because our sixteen-year-old son may have ratted us out. Properly reprimanded, we continued to play a while for the sake of competition only, but in short order we lost interest. 

 

Both her parents and that girl, now a grown woman at work on her own advanced degree, still tell this Pontoon story to friends, always evoking chuckles, because the whole business was funny. But getting home late after that prison meeting, as I say, I stood in our dooryard for quite a spell before going inside. November’s Beaver Moon hypnotized me. It was by an inner light, however, that I grasped something for the first time. My loss of interest in those Pontoon games after my wife put the hammer down may well have had something to do, at least in part, with the fact that we weren’t betting anymore. I shivered a bit, and not from the night’s chill alone.

 

In short, I came to see my own behavior in Switzerland from an unanticipated perspective. Why, I now wondered, did I persist in a contest that I lost again and again? The answer came to me unbidden: I’d been dead certain that each game would mark the start of a winning streak as long as our child’s. In short, no matter how funny and negligible my gambling proved, I recognized that something lay inside of me that I don’t ever want to nurture.

 

Here in our part of northern New England, there exist no casinos or OTB parlors, but whenever I watch the Celtics or the Redsox, I see advertisements for online betting sites. There they lurk, one keyboard’s click away. From what he’s told me, and I haven’t the smallest reason to doubt him, Stonemason Stan has never looked into any of these facilities. And I don’t mean to either.

Last night, a foot and a half of snow veiled the predominantly drab ground of the winter, another dire reminder of climate change. Snow or not, though, I can’t account for something I witnessed this morning: I noticed a honeybee caught between a window and a screen.

So what to do about this tiny creature? I thought of the world’s decline in pollinators, which gave me pause. Getting the bee outside would mean its death, as even daytime temperature would stay too cold, but leaving it would also be fatal, the sill getting minimal warmth from the house. I could bring the bug indoors, but then what? The poor, chilled thing was nearly immobile, its progress allowing me concentrated inspection. How orderly those three abdominal bands! How like a Valentine’s heart its face? Everything about the bee seemed prodigious, a synecdoche for the whole, vast realm of nature.

I escaped for a short hike. When I returned, the bee had disappeared. (My wife, off visiting a friend, could have had no part in its vanishing.) I felt disproportionately saddened. The insect’s life under normal circumstances would have been brief; wherever it may have gone, its life now would surely be even more so.

Lately, when I start writing, my recourse to the subject of brevity– now including the existence of pollinators and perhaps even of homo sapiens– is almost automatic, and may be growing tiresome to my most faithful reader. I can weary of it myself, the refrain leading too often to the sort of mournfulness engendered by my honeybee episode. And mourning can turn facile, blinding me to how much world exists beyond mere lament, how many people there are to contemplate, execrate, celebrate. And I have little grounds for lament anyhow: if I’m not the physical specimen of my youth, compared to many of my age, I’m walking along the fabled Easy Street– at least so far– toward my conclusion. Yes, thinking of the world our grandchildren will inherit can keep me sleepless, but my own day-to-day existence would be enviable to many.

Of course, at 81, I might pardon myself for the theme of transiency’s intrusion on the page despite prior plans. (Wait: what were they?) The theme’s at its most distracting whenever I call up past events or personalities. The longer I live, the more recently every experience, big or small, seems to have come into my life, just as abruptly to depart, like that little bee. What remains?

I rarely know what will prompt my reminiscences. Perhaps because I took with three dogs, I conjure the misery of a tick-borne disease that almost killed me a while back. I likely caught it in those same woods, or maybe one of these dogs’ predecessors passed a bloodsucker on to me. That was eight years ago. What? My memory of it stays vivid: one day, feeling just a bit tired, I suddenly fell to the floor, dizzy, short of breath. I lost control of my bowels, was hard put to speak. I stayed in the hospital almost a week, and exhaustion persisted for half a year. My brain wants to tell me this all came to pass three years ago. 2016 seems impossible.

It easy to understand why a sense of the transitory would have a grip on an octogenarian. I think of myself at ten, say, when a year represented a tenth of my lifespan. Time moved differently then. I rejoiced at getting out of school in June, for example, but by mid-August I wanted to go back, society limited to my family and one or two neighborhood chums too confining. The muggy summer days lasted for ages, as did the nights, when I lay in bed and watched the rare passing car’s headlights migrate around the walls, fearing the darkness would be interminable.

Between the Decembers of 2023 and 2024, on the other hand, I’ll have lived a mere eighty-secondth of my life. No wonder some nights and days and weeks and months seem so brief they’re gone before they’re well started. Illustrations of time’s pace in boyhood as opposed to now are countless. And so, unbidden, but likely because my dogs came with me in my bushwhacking, the memory of my first dog arrives. It was on my eighth birthday that I got him, a Norwich terrier so small I could fit him into the pouch of my hoodie. Biggie, as I dubbed him, thinking myself clever, was at ease in his confinement, lying as still as a Buddha there. I delighted in surprising people by fetching him out. His stubby tail spun like a motorboat’s propeller then.

Biggie lived just past my seventeenth birthday, but with those teens had come a painful yen for romance. I’m ashamed to admit that I used Biggie for bait. I’d always been self-doubting and awkward, but once a girl gave my terrier her attention conversation became more manageable. I still harbor some guilt over my exploitation, not of the girls, which to my dismay never amounted to much, but of my dog, who died just before I went off to college.

I had no other dog until my second year of graduate school. Since those days, however, my family has owned 24 dogs. All have been a delight, but just now I think of my favorite, an English pointer named Pete. Handsome, biddable, alert, affectionate, Pete was killed way too young by cancer. Biggie lived the same nine short years, but he’d seemed such a perdurable presence that his death seemed unfathomable; when I knelt next to my pointer as our vet inserted her needle, I wondered how this beloved creature could have been with us so fleetingly. The length of a year hadn’t changed, of course. I had.

It’s obviously my nature to let my mind run free. No use apologizing. Just now I look up at a slew of photographs on our refrigerator. Our grandchildren are in most of them, and to compare the snapshot of one boy at six to the same one at eight is almost like considering two different beings, one round-featured, shaggy, and blond, the older, after a mere two years, angular, his darker hair barber-styled. Change! Its velocity! I could say something similar about each of the other six boys and girls in the snapshots held there by magnets. But I could say it about everything.

Truth is, I resist those photos, as I do all photos of people I’ve loved, especially the young and the gone. At family events, my wife and various others will pick up albums, cooing, laughing, and joking about the various figures they show, their disparate appearances then and now. They’ll recall the locales in which they appear, sorting out what took them to those places. Having small choice, I may join in this sharing, and I feign similar enthusiasm, no matter that my truer response, ever stronger, is, yes, to weep at the swiftness of time.

A train’s whistle breaks in on my wool-gathering. Our home lies in remote territory: one traffic light, for example, in the entire county, two hundred boxes in our post office, miles of ambient forest. We live among those woods, and we can’t see another house from here. But railroad tracks run along the river not far to our east, a slow freight making a round trip there four times a day, blowing its whistle north of us or south, depending if it’s coming or going.

For years, our nearest neighbors here were Tink and Polly Hood, eighth-generation Vermonters, both of whom lived into their mid-nineties. One evening early in our friendship, I stood in their dooryard with Tink. When we heard that somber wail upriver, Tink breathed, “Forty of ‘em come through every day when I was small.” That was at the end of a golden age in rail transport, when trains hereabouts carried passengers as well as cargo and mail. You could travel almost anywhere in the United States by boarding one and making the right connections. Tink remembered people from Boston getting off at our own little depot to pick strawberries, this stretch of river-plain famous for them even now. “Kids’ parents saved shoes for school days,” he told me. “And these city people, all dressed up in jackets and dresses and that-like, why, they’d look at us in bare feet, and you could see some felt sorry for us. Then they’d go off in their fancy outfits to pick berries in that heat, and we kind of felt sorry for them.”

I think of that story whenever I hear the whistle. The sound reminds me that Tink and Polly, whom we knew for decades, are gone. My dog Biggie seemed almost a constant presence in my life, and then evaporated. Likewise, but more importantly, our beloved grandmother, who also lived well into her nineties. We shared a house with her and never thought of her as other than a fixture– until, unfathomably, she was not. I’d become a grown man with my own house by the time she died, but her absence still stunned me. The Hoods now seem almost mythical figures. To remember them is to marvel at how brief our friendship feels. I met them in my late forties and didn’t bid them farewell until my late seventies. An eyeblink, by the feel of it.

For me, however, the train has a wider resonance. In my own boyhood, government policies promoting cars and planes were making rail travel increasingly obsolete, but many little towns still had their own stations. I recall how excited I got whenever I’d board a Pullman with my father, especially if, as the oldest of his five children, I were the only one on the trip. It didn’t matter where we were going on those outings. I relished everything: the purple plush of the seats, the clacking of the iron wheels, the porters in their spotless white jackets and gloves, the brass and pastries and smell of coffee in the dining car, the ever-changing landscape that rolled by on either side, and above all the benign company of that gentle parent.

Who died at 56.

One scene we beheld together from a railroad car has ineradicably lodged itself. I must have been around thirteen, but I don’t recall our physical destination. I’m certain, however, of the spiritual, which I’ve visited periodically ever since. We took that ride in December, I suspect, because by late afternoon it had gotten dark outside. However, a thawed and refrozen coat of snow lay on the ground in those parts, the icy surface intensifying the brightness of a world already drenched in moonbeams.

We crossed a river, and on its far shore, three boulders and the remains of a flatbed truck, which had obviously burned, were outlined against the bank. Whatever their look in daytime, the shine off these crude shapes, and even more the way they were arranged, robbed my breath. None had a symmetrical relation to another, yet they somehow showed a perfect congruence, as if some mighty power had placed them just so, understanding how dramatic the charred chassis’ sable against the glittering backdrop would be, and how all this would somehow chime with the vibrations from the train’s motion. I was transported.

As a mere boy, I wouldn’t have meant “transported out of time,” nor for different reasons do I claim as much now. Still, to relive that moment in mind is an option I often can and do choose. There remain additional kinds of recollection, of course, but along with perhaps four or five other visual memories in my long life, that one has fixed itself in my mind’s eye forever.

No, of course: there is no forever. Or if there is, how might such an experience have portended it? I’ve thought about that for ages, quite fuzzily, without resolution. All I’m suggesting as I look at the preceding reverie is that certain images, often equally curious, do endure through a whole lifespan. Some of them light my way, some blight it, but at least they hint, however minimally, at perpetuity. They somehow remain when others don’t.

The tiny, out-of-season honeybee that appeared and vanished this morning may become such a lasting image. I’ll have to live a while to find out, and just now, whatever my age, that seems very much worth doing.

Last night, a foot and a half of snow veiled the predominantly drab ground of the winter, another dire reminder of climate change. Snow or not, though, I can’t account for something I witnessed this morning: I noticed a honeybee caught between a window and a screen.

So what to do about this tiny creature? I thought of the world’s decline in pollinators, which gave me pause. Getting the bee outside would mean its death, as even daytime temperature would stay too cold, but leaving it would also be fatal, the sill getting minimal warmth from the house. I could bring the bug indoors, but then what? The poor, chilled thing was nearly immobile, its progress allowing me concentrated inspection. How orderly those three abdominal bands! How like a Valentine’s heart its face? Everything about the bee seemed prodigious, a synecdoche for the whole, vast realm of nature.

I escaped for a short hike. When I returned, the bee had disappeared. (My wife, off visiting a friend, could have had no part in its vanishing.) I felt disproportionately saddened. The insect’s life under normal circumstances would have been brief; wherever it may have gone, its life now would surely be even more so.

Lately, when I start writing, my recourse to the subject of brevity– now including the existence of pollinators and perhaps even of homo sapiens– is almost automatic, and may be growing tiresome to my most faithful reader. I can weary of it myself, the refrain leading too often to the sort of mournfulness engendered by my honeybee episode. And mourning can turn facile, blinding me to how much world exists beyond mere lament, how many people there are to contemplate, execrate, celebrate. And I have little grounds for lament anyhow: if I’m not the physical specimen of my youth, compared to many of my age, I’m walking along the fabled Easy Street– at least so far– toward my conclusion. Yes, thinking of the world our grandchildren will inherit can keep me sleepless, but my own day-to-day existence would be enviable to many.

Of course, at 81, I might pardon myself for the theme of transiency’s intrusion on the page despite prior plans. (Wait: what were they?) The theme’s at its most distracting whenever I call up past events or personalities. The longer I live, the more recently every experience, big or small, seems to have come into my life, just as abruptly to depart, like that little bee. What remains?

I rarely know what will prompt my reminiscences. Perhaps because I took with three dogs, I conjure the misery of a tick-borne disease that almost killed me a while back. I likely caught it in those same woods, or maybe one of these dogs’ predecessors passed a bloodsucker on to me. That was eight years ago. What? My memory of it stays vivid: one day, feeling just a bit tired, I suddenly fell to the floor, dizzy, short of breath. I lost control of my bowels, was hard put to speak. I stayed in the hospital almost a week, and exhaustion persisted for half a year. My brain wants to tell me this all came to pass three years ago. 2016 seems impossible.

It easy to understand why a sense of the transitory would have a grip on an octogenarian. I think of myself at ten, say, when a year represented a tenth of my lifespan. Time moved differently then. I rejoiced at getting out of school in June, for example, but by mid-August I wanted to go back, society limited to my family and one or two neighborhood chums too confining. The muggy summer days lasted for ages, as did the nights, when I lay in bed and watched the rare passing car’s headlights migrate around the walls, fearing the darkness would be interminable.

Between the Decembers of 2023 and 2024, on the other hand, I’ll have lived a mere eighty-secondth of my life. No wonder some nights and days and weeks and months seem so brief they’re gone before they’re well started. Illustrations of time’s pace in boyhood as opposed to now are countless. And so, unbidden, but likely because my dogs came with me in my bushwhacking, the memory of my first dog arrives. It was on my eighth birthday that I got him, a Norwich terrier so small I could fit him into the pouch of my hoodie. Biggie, as I dubbed him, thinking myself clever, was at ease in his confinement, lying as still as a Buddha there. I delighted in surprising people by fetching him out. His stubby tail spun like a motorboat’s propeller then.

Biggie lived just past my seventeenth birthday, but with those teens had come a painful yen for romance. I’m ashamed to admit that I used Biggie for bait. I’d always been self-doubting and awkward, but once a girl gave my terrier her attention conversation became more manageable. I still harbor some guilt over my exploitation, not of the girls, which to my dismay never amounted to much, but of my dog, who died just before I went off to college.

I had no other dog until my second year of graduate school. Since those days, however, my family has owned 24 dogs. All have been a delight, but just now I think of my favorite, an English pointer named Pete. Handsome, biddable, alert, affectionate, Pete was killed way too young by cancer. Biggie lived the same nine short years, but he’d seemed such a perdurable presence that his death seemed unfathomable; when I knelt next to my pointer as our vet inserted her needle, I wondered how this beloved creature could have been with us so fleetingly. The length of a year hadn’t changed, of course. I had.

It’s obviously my nature to let my mind run free. No use apologizing. Just now I look up at a slew of photographs on our refrigerator. Our grandchildren are in most of them, and to compare the snapshot of one boy at six to the same one at eight is almost like considering two different beings, one round-featured, shaggy, and blond, the older, after a mere two years, angular, his darker hair barber-styled. Change! Its velocity! I could say something similar about each of the other six boys and girls in the snapshots held there by magnets. But I could say it about everything.

Truth is, I resist those photos, as I do all photos of people I’ve loved, especially the young and the gone. At family events, my wife and various others will pick up albums, cooing, laughing, and joking about the various figures they show, their disparate appearances then and now. They’ll recall the locales in which they appear, sorting out what took them to those places. Having small choice, I may join in this sharing, and I feign similar enthusiasm, no matter that my truer response, ever stronger, is, yes, to weep at the swiftness of time.

A train’s whistle breaks in on my wool-gathering. Our home lies in remote territory: one traffic light, for example, in the entire county, two hundred boxes in our post office, miles of ambient forest. We live among those woods, and we can’t see another house from here. But railroad tracks run along the river not far to our east, a slow freight making a round trip there four times a day, blowing its whistle north of us or south, depending if it’s coming or going.

For years, our nearest neighbors here were Tink and Polly Hood, eighth-generation Vermonters, both of whom lived into their mid-nineties. One evening early in our friendship, I stood in their dooryard with Tink. When we heard that somber wail upriver, Tink breathed, “Forty of ‘em come through every day when I was small.” That was at the end of a golden age in rail transport, when trains hereabouts carried passengers as well as cargo and mail. You could travel almost anywhere in the United States by boarding one and making the right connections. Tink remembered people from Boston getting off at our own little depot to pick strawberries, this stretch of river-plain famous for them even now. “Kids’ parents saved shoes for school days,” he told me. “And these city people, all dressed up in jackets and dresses and that-like, why, they’d look at us in bare feet, and you could see some felt sorry for us. Then they’d go off in their fancy outfits to pick berries in that heat, and we kind of felt sorry for them.”

I think of that story whenever I hear the whistle. The sound reminds me that Tink and Polly, whom we knew for decades, are gone. My dog Biggie seemed almost a constant presence in my life, and then evaporated. Likewise, but more importantly, our beloved grandmother, who also lived well into her nineties. We shared a house with her and never thought of her as other than a fixture– until, unfathomably, she was not. I’d become a grown man with my own house by the time she died, but her absence still stunned me. The Hoods now seem almost mythical figures. To remember them is to marvel at how brief our friendship feels. I met them in my late forties and didn’t bid them farewell until my late seventies. An eyeblink, by the feel of it.

For me, however, the train has a wider resonance. In my own boyhood, government policies promoting cars and planes were making rail travel increasingly obsolete, but many little towns still had their own stations. I recall how excited I got whenever I’d board a Pullman with my father, especially if, as the oldest of his five children, I were the only one on the trip. It didn’t matter where we were going on those outings. I relished everything: the purple plush of the seats, the clacking of the iron wheels, the porters in their spotless white jackets and gloves, the brass and pastries and smell of coffee in the dining car, the ever-changing landscape that rolled by on either side, and above all the benign company of that gentle parent.

Who died at 56.

One scene we beheld together from a railroad car has ineradicably lodged itself. I must have been around thirteen, but I don’t recall our physical destination. I’m certain, however, of the spiritual, which I’ve visited periodically ever since. We took that ride in December, I suspect, because by late afternoon it had gotten dark outside. However, a thawed and refrozen coat of snow lay on the ground in those parts, the icy surface intensifying the brightness of a world already drenched in moonbeams.

We crossed a river, and on its far shore, three boulders and the remains of a flatbed truck, which had obviously burned, were outlined against the bank. Whatever their look in daytime, the shine off these crude shapes, and even more the way they were arranged, robbed my breath. None had a symmetrical relation to another, yet they somehow showed a perfect congruence, as if some mighty power had placed them just so, understanding how dramatic the charred chassis’ sable against the glittering backdrop would be, and how all this would somehow chime with the vibrations from the train’s motion. I was transported.

As a mere boy, I wouldn’t have meant “transported out of time,” nor for different reasons do I claim as much now. Still, to relive that moment in mind is an option I often can and do choose. There remain additional kinds of recollection, of course, but along with perhaps four or five other visual memories in my long life, that one has fixed itself in my mind’s eye forever.

No, of course: there is no forever. Or if there is, how might such an experience have portended it? I’ve thought about that for ages, quite fuzzily, without resolution. All I’m suggesting as I look at the preceding reverie is that certain images, often equally curious, do endure through a whole lifespan. Some of them light my way, some blight it, but at least they hint, however minimally, at perpetuity. They somehow remain when others don’t.

The tiny, out-of-season honeybee that appeared and vanished this morning may become such a lasting image. I’ll have to live a while to find out, and just now, whatever my age, that seems very much worth doing.

Rapt, an old man inspects his living room mirror

but not for his image. Instead, its angle

subtly reflects the light of a stub of candle

on the silent piano. He might say the reflection shimmers

but the years, though blessed, have jaded him some.

 

He’d rather avoid such a hackneyed word

but he’s also abandoned the urge to think up a better.

A train comes to mind, though he doesn’t know why.

He can’t recall when it was he saw it or even

if, but it seems some caboose’s lantern

 

lodged in his mind a lifetime ago, its glow

growing distant. Was it even then a matter

of things he longed for fading? The rattle and click

on the tracks make a poignant song. He’d rather

ignore its meaning, clearer now than ever.

I smacked my foot against a table leg this morning and scolded myself: Watch where you’re going! A blood-bead stood below the nail, whose jaundiced color puzzled our grandson, here for the weekend. He asked, “Grandpa, how come you’re gold?”

But he quickly turned his attention to that little globe of blood.  Our interest in pain, or so it seems to me, develops early. We may take whatever measures we can to avoid it and yet it intrigues.

I recall, for instance, a hornet’s stinging that child’s older brother a summer ago. The two still speak of the incident now and then. The pains, or rather for the most part griefs, that hold my own attention now tend to be psychological rather than bodily, however hard they often are to identify exactly.

This grandson of ours owns a little plush dog named Oko for whatever reason, and the child loves to say he’s been stolen by what he calls billains. Or sometimes the dog’s simply lost. I know it’s feigned, yet I still wince at his look, precisely, of pain.

Oko’s never gone for long, however, and I rejoice with the boy when he’s found.

Speaking of loss, at my age I’m losing friends, some to the Reaper, some to scrambled brains. I wish I could find them again, celebrate their return. One of the brightest men I’ve known, for instance, an estimable poet and critic, is now so overwhelmed by multiple sclerosis that he can barely talk, let alone move; another longtime friend, this one Irish, a man with whom I’ve shared woe, delight, and absurdist humor for decades, is in a seaside institution, and doesn’t even know my name; yet another has just been informed that she has incurable stage cancer of the throat, and she’s arranging for hospice care; two springs ago, my very best friend on earth– marathon runner, non-smoker and -drinker– himself contracted irremediable cancer of the duodenum  and was gone in less than  twelve months. The list seems all but infinitely extensible.

As for me, at last I’ve become my family’s oldest member, apart from two of my own first cousins I haven’t seen in decades. Both my grandparents and parents, one brother, all my aunts and uncles are long since gone. So when Oko disappears and our grandson expects me to make a sorrowful face, I do have resources.

I struggle against dwelling on my own mortality. I don’t always prevail, but when I do arrive at a saner frame of mind, I conclude that so long as I’m not dead, I’m alive.  Instead of trying to reckon how long I’ll keep them, I concentrate on my capacious blessings.

Of course, I’m experiencing natural physical decline, but I can still hike, row my shell, and in fact do pretty much what I’ve always done, at however stately a pace.  My short-term memory is not what it was, but I can still write and think pretty clearly (at least I think I can). A subtle bittersweetness has taken up permanent residence in my soul, but far better that than dejection

Before we carry him up to bed, our grandson, plush dog in hand, dictates words to us for a postcard we’ll send to his mother and father and that hornet-stung brother.

Grandpa’s toes are gold. Today he bleeded. I lost Oko but Grandpa found him. He’s happy.