Silver Lake

Moments and spans of time snake their way through my memory and find themselves transfixed in mid-flight, and just suddenly, due to some smell or some sound or some dream everything that was past is present, and everything from then is now, but only in those elusive spasms when I mutter things to myself to keep me affixed to some other keen reality entirely. Time machines. 

I smell foliage. I try to hug a willow tree. I cannot get my arms fully around its trunk, but imagine that I will be able to someday. I imagine that, even if my mind was still too delicate to predict a new millennium with any certainty, vague or concrete, there would always be these summer days. I wonder if that willow still stands. 

It provided terrific shade over the entirety of the lawn in front of the garage where the picnic table stood. But then one day the largest branch falls, and it is chopped up and hauled away and I think of an animal being slaughtered, feel that the tree must feel some acute pain, feel that when they fill the gaping hole with concrete that something of the tree’s essential nobility is marred. I stand in the shallows as minnows move about my ankles and move under the wilting branches of the tree. from the pier I watch some kids from the park next door. I rebuke them for trying to swing from the branches, this ultimate affront to the tree’s dignity. I feel something bordering on kinship, the ultimate fixture of a childhood spent swimming in a lake called silver. 

The cousins are there, myriads. They are all younger than me, and in their small stature offer something of the victim of our games, when they float about on the tubes and I move about like a shark come to tease them. I move below the tube and bump against it from under the water and can hear their muted wails from under the water with that greenish tint I see when I’m brave enough to open my eyes and see suspended green granular globules of algae.

Fourth of July. We run about with sparklers that penetrate the deep night and act as counterweight to its encompassing bleakness. All electric is the air, all the stars blotted out by the fireworks that still dazzle the retinas of youth. 

Hot dogs. The parents like them burnt. They are covered in onions and relish and mustard and in the great yawning ages that are my youth I cannot count them, nor would I want to, for life in those days was so stubborn in its delights that no amount of calculation could possibly consume the blissful reality, the reality of minnows and that bluegill with the hook in its eye, or my father holding up a bass all triumphant, or me running across the pier and frightening the fish away. But how they return as soon as bits of stale bread come tumbling from my small hands, come tumbling and melting in the shallow waters where the bluegill and the perch hide from the pike or the bass. This is my reality, unstained by realism or dogma. 

A pontoon boat. Each day ends with a trip around the lake, the big houses on one side something to admire as we wonder what sorts of people might live there in their privilege. But we, the little ones, fail to grasp amidst what privilege we sit, sunning ourselves by those imposing rays and floating about in total serenity. That mansion sits in the corner with its bowling alley and its steep view on some brilliant vista and we imagine the oligarch looking down on us in his haughty guile, we peons, we proles, and I feel that sting that says yes, I would like to live there someday. On the other side of the lake we linger and anchor, for the bottoms are sandy, the lanes choked by other boats whose owners also anchor themselves on these idyllic shores. I move about in the water that is waist deep and move ever more bravely to the deeper waters as boats fly past ten feet from my bobbing body. I marvel at them all, these lucky few who while away their days in such ways. I climb back onto the boat clumsily and sit sunning myself. 

The faster boat I fear. Those who are braver tube with proud glee, speeding about counterclockwise as is the unspoken compact of all the boats. But when I feel obliged to enter those waters thick with weeds, I feel the pang of fright and put my thumb down to signal that they should drive slower. I fret going under, fret flipping and waiting insecurely for the boat to turn around and rescue me. I would like to go back there, all brave and indignant of my former timidity and boldly ride those waves. But I will never have that chance, will never linger on the other side, will never hug that tree, will never watch fireworks and play with cousins and clutch weeds in my hands. This is all gone, and all I have left is a time machine called memory. 

In the end we all sit in the family room, our faces all reddened by the sun and the water. We are wrapped in towels, eating popsicles, unerringly indifferent to all life suspended outside the fenced-in property where stands our little cottage. I would like to see cousins once again so carefree. They are married now. Married with children, burdened by work and heartache and loss, as all slips away. I wonder if that willow still stands.