Assignment 4

Part I:  a description of a scene. Mostly action, something that happened to ourselves or someone we know.


I could never remember how my grandfather died. It was before I was born, and my confusion lay in whether it was heart attack or drowning, but there was no clear story.  Last year, my parents were here for my mother’s spring break from teaching, and we drove to Moab.  As we wound through the most dangerous highway in America, in the black of night, with the slushy spring snow splattering around us, my Dad told me the whole story.
     It was the winter of 1972, and he was living in California, having just married my mother.  They had begun to talk about moving back to Maine, so my father could re-join the rest of the family fishing for lobster.  His father would repair his old boat for my Dad to use.  The engine was good, but for whatever reason, he had decided to swap it out for a diesel.  He and my dad’s youngest brother set out to bring the boat back from the repair yard, in the early morning hours of March.  The air was thick with fog, and it is easy for me to imagine it—that icy kind of fog that seems to be the ocean’s way of defying its inability to freeze, by reaching up and wrapping you in a layer of pervasive cold.  They would have stood firmly at the wheel, not even noticing the moisture freezing to their facial hair, talking about the coming season, the number of traps to prepare, the buoys to paint.  Or maybe, not at all, as the engines of lobster boats are loud, a thick rumble.
The journey back from the dry dock was uneventful, and gave them no warning that the course of lives was about to change for a clan of fishermen, and children yet born.  As they reached the harbor and drew close to their mooring, something went wrong. The rope Dickie had thrown to tie up to their skiff fell short.  Reaching for it, he slipped, and fell in.  The Atlantic is entirely unforgiving in any season, and March is no closer to spring than a snowplow’s blade.  The water shocked him, and he floundered—like most fishermen in the northeast, he didn’t know how to swim.  His father, too, was among those fishermen, but on instinct plunged in after him.  I can see in my mind the pair of them in the gray morning air, struggling.  To an uninformed onlooker, it might have looked like they were fighting—and they were—fighting for life, fighting against their benefactor.  I have never understood why men who spend their lives on the sea would not learn to battle it better, in hand-to-hand combat.  They are quiet warriors, victorious against the swells and the winds as they maneuver their boats, but there seems to be an unspoken pact to stay out of the water, and a firm denial that it would ever become necessary to enter it.
In brief moments that surely felt like hours, my uncle finally gained purchase of the small rowboat and flung himself inside. Not pausing to catch his breath he leaned out to bring his father to safety as well.  It was too late.  By the time he dragged the weathered and worn figure into the small wooden boat, a heart attack had taken him.  Writing this, as when listening to my father’s version, I am flooded with images of the ensuing moments, as the reality sunk in to a man who had nearly lost his life, but had instead lost his father.  








Part II : we were instructed to write one page, of ourselves in the act of writing.

     The house is finally quiet, and I ache from the exertion of making it so.  Kids bathed and jammied and read-to and tucked.  I am in a warm circle of light, the rest of the house sits in shadowy darkness.  There are sounds—laundry tumbling along in the dryer, a distant mumbling television on some other floor, but all I really feel is my computer.  I love this machine, in whatever form it has taken over the years.  The hard drive doesn’t matter, it’s the keyboard I love.  I have a hard time writing with a pen these days…my fingers can’t form letters, can’t move as fast as I can type—I leave off the first letter of words, or start a word with the first letter of the next word.  It’s awkward, this transition from penmanship to…what? To clickmanship?  It’s not just typing, it’s a whole new way of breathing, for me.  I have been typing for about half my life, but somehow the marked lack of anything more than a grocery list in my never-neat writing over the past years has crippled me.  It reminds me very much of the point Berry made, in “An Entrance to the Woods,” about our bodies arriving somewhere before we do, because driving isn’t the natural means of transportation.  
Through writing on my blog, I connect with this machine, in the most primal of ways. It is as though my soul has a USB cable, and I pour my alternately gooey or cobwebby or slippery insides onto the page, and I feel real.  I feel valid, I feel vented.  
Sitting with my feet propped on my CPU (ssh—don’t tell my computer geek husband!), I am as comfortable as my uniform would suggest.  Flannel PJs and fuzzy slippers make up for the discomfort of my chair, although it distracts me, reminding me that the contractors are behind on finishing the basement, so my office is still not my office.