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.