by Brian Longacre
I used to sit beside my mom and watch Golden Girls. I loved being near her when she laughed. She didn’t seem to like laughing because she usually covered her mouth or quickly spoke, saying something like “E-gad” or “Oh for goodness’ sakes” to break the laugh bubbling up inside her. But the best laughs were the ones she didn’t see coming. My dad was Presbyterian and so she was, and Presbyterians weren’t keen on laughing much. In the last weeks of Mom’s life, weeks before her 91st birthday, I regularly sat beside her hospitable bed, a Transformer bed that could lift, lower, and roll, and more than once, turned her into a taco because she held down the upright button, shouting “No, no, no, stop it! I hate this stupid thing!” This thing that tormented her by her own doing replaced the bed in her own bedroom nearly two years before when she came home from the hospital with a shower chair, more pills, and COVID. After COVID switched places with her and a visiting nurse, she lost her dependence on being independent, but she never lost her quick wit or her serrated tongue.
“Hey Mom, can I get you a drink?”
“Well, the last time I said yes to that your father slipped a ring on my finger.”
“Yeah, but those were the happiest 57 years of your life, right?” (My dad died five years ago.)
“You keep telling yourself that.”
I used to think that my mom was worried that her tongue would fall out if she ever used it to say something nice until my middle daughter became her full-time caregiver and Mom would brag about me, but never to me. She’d tell my daughter that I was “a good’n” and stories about things I had done that impressed her. When my daughter would tell me these things, I would say something like, “Yeah, well, stop slipping whiskey in grandma’s juice” then quietly tear up as I made myself busy. Turns out, I am my mother’s son, and I’ve cut a few hearts with my wit and tongue, too. In those last weeks of her sedentary life, I would sit beside her while the Game Show Network shouted at us. She would criticize the commercials and the host’s clothes and the ridiculous get-ups the female contestants wore.
“Why do they always get hookers for this show?”
“They’re cheaper than escorts, Mom.”
“You better not!”
My mom understood everything. We had a routine. One time as she was slipping to sleep–she didn’t go or fall to sleep because she was always just one long blink away–she grabbed my hand, which I had rested on the remote control next to her. Maybe she was simply making sure I was there or making sure I wasn’t leaving. Maybe she was scared to sleep because it was dark and looked like dying from her side. Maybe she wanted to say something nice but didn’t know how. Whatever her reasons, I stared through tears at Steve Harvey and his “circus suit” knowing I was losing Mom, my counselor, the only person whose opinion I cared about ever since I was a teenager trying to express myself wrapped well within my teenage chrysalis, the person who most resembled me and the only parts of me I liked. Maybe I was scared, too.
That’s why I like sitting beside this river, the French Broad River, named for both its width (broad) and the French settlement along its banks prior to 1600. She is an ancient river, who flows north. Her myriad stories are countless. Her days are measured in layers of rock deep beneath middle earth. She is a profound and timeless mystery. That, and there is a coffee shop here. Hi-Five Coffee. It’s not my favorite, but it’s coffee and that’s enough. So, on days when I can step out of my regular track and steal a few quiet moments here, I do. My marriage is a fenced garden rife with rare plants and fragrant herbs, tended carefully with bare hands and heart, but even the best, most loyal gardeners enjoy an occasional hike in the woods, a handful of sifting sand, or a long sit by the river.
Today, I decided to stop once I finished the few errands that needed doing. I like putting a stop like this at the other end of errands I hate making as a reward for good behavior. I’m 54 years old, married thirty years, three daughters, so I like sports, drink IPAs, and watch movies with Kevin Costner. But, below all of that, I am very much like a river. I receive the run off of others, nearly everyone, from family members to the media, making their pollution my own. Today, I am feeling my daughter’s unusually heavy period as well as the toxic mystery those folks in Ohio have been breathing in for weeks. And like a river, I swell and rage and get carried away. In a flash, I can overpower people and things in my path. I also contain much life. I am alive with creative ideas that dart about like fish. I teem with art. Life thrives in me, and when it doesn’t, when it dies, it settles at the bottom, becomes nourishment, making fertile places for more ideas, more art, more life. In these ways, this river feels like kin.
Here, where I am sitting, the river is shallow. There are boulders in the middle whose bald heads stay dry. The body of a small tree bobs and rolls against them. Moments ago, geese, in Air Force formation, flew low along the river, honking in case I didn’t notice them. My coffee is losing itself in this cool, spring breeze, and my head is a swirl with ideas about what I am going to do. Last night, my wife, in an aberrant fit of anxiety, asked me, like a prosecuting attorney tired of sustained objections from status quo, “What the hell are you doing with your life?” She said it quickly as if it had broken free from some thin, poorly taped restraint. Frankly, it was hard to tell the difference between her voice and the ones that have been berating me from the inside for years. I stared at her, shocked that my inaction was so obvious. She, I suspect, may have been shocked that her wondering had made its way so forcefully out of her mouth, and when she saw me tranquilized, she just walked away, knowing that my stupefied face would not likely reanimate for hours. That was yesterday. Today, I am fishing for an answer.
It occurs to me, after a long, untimed while, that I am the fish, and the good news is also the bad news: I am a fish near a river, near this amazing, ancient river. I am a few flops from being back in the flow, back where I belong, where I can thrive, where I can actually answer what the hell I am doing with my life. But, I am also a few failed flops from drying up like dog shit and crumbling into the dirt. Both are true and have been true for a long time. So, flop one: I have never felt more professionally fit as when I taught students who wanted to learn, and that was when I taught basic writing and grammar in a community college classroom. I thoroughly enjoyed the renewal that many of my students felt as obstructions were dismantled, confusions cleared, as “fucking grammar shit” finally made sense. I was often the first English teacher that simplified English instead of complicating it, and I took real joy from this. Flop two: I love being a dad, and my favorite people on this planet are my daughters. They, all three, are the most beautiful, kind, creative, determined people I know. They are endlessly inspiring, and my greatest goal is to be that chest they rested on when they were new in this world. Flop three, and I am getting really close to the water now: my wife is the strangest, most amazing, most infuriating person I know, and I am utterly addicted to her. No one has made me physically hurt when I fear I’m losing them like her. She is an entire weather system, spawning hurricanes and sunny days in equal measure, and all of it is necessary. Flop four, and one more flop should do it: I want to write one goddamn book because, as a Jackson Pollock painting, I think my art is better contained in one, frenetic frame instead of being singled and parceled into several diluted forms. I would rather make one big, brilliant mess that some will consider genius than many little literary curiosities that most will consider cute if considering at all.
Flop, splash! That’s it. It’s that simple. I am in the water. Kick, kick, sweep, and I am swimming again. I need a master’s degree to get a community college classroom to get a life that keeps a house, a car, and occasional travel, to get a life that keeps my wife to get a place where I can see my daughters living their lives and write a goddamn book!
You couldn’t see it, but I just raised my cold cup of coffee to the river as if saying “Cheers,” and the river did the same. Now, I have an answer for my wife and for the small choir singing the same question she asked yesterday. I want to call my mom and tell her too, which immediately stills me, now wondering if all that stuff I learned about Heaven is true, wondering if she is among the “cloud of witnesses that surround me” like I learned in Sunday school, wondering if she already knows how this ends because she is just a few doors down from Jesus and Grandma with a bird’s eye view of my entire life. If she is, she must be impossibly frustrated that she can’t tell me. It is easy to imagine her yelling at the game show that is my life, the volume up louder than anyone near her likes, criticizing me for sitting by the river when there are real things that need doing. “Stop sitting on your ass like your father and get busy!” she shouts, which is probably why my father started going to the beach or to the park to sit on his ass.
I finish my coffee and stand up, empty my pockets and set it all on the chair because I know what I have to do. I must go in. I must stop sitting beside the river. I need to be in the river. I need to baptize this new idea, this answer. It’s cold and much colder in the water, but I must hate myself and this version of me beside myself enough to walk in despite every reasonable idea not to. I must walk into the river, repent of my aimless ways, and commit to a new path because I now know what the hell I am doing. Like Jesus and John the Baptist, I am walking into the Jordan River, the river as a metaphor for death, and I am succumbing to its power by submerging myself in it, but more than that, I am rising from it, showing my volition to overcome its death, to resurrect my tired, listless life with new determination. I must.
I take off my shirt so that I have something dry to put back on, and I take one step into the river. My shoe disappears into the slimy, silty river sand. Cold grabs my leg even before I know it’s wet. I remember my watch and toss it towards the chair, landing softly in a tuft of grass near it. I then take a deep breath and moon-steps toward the middle of this beautiful, ancient river, pushing water ahead of me. My feet find things to step on, stones like bones strewn and slowly rolled downstream. My breath is stuck in my chest. I choose to ignore how cold it is even as my body shivers and shakes at me. I choose to think of the shivering as me shaking off what I don’t want. My darkening pants pull the cold water up as new, feral blood flows with mine. My soft belly, still dry but afraid of the water, spasms, as my legs report the changes. I look back from the first set of boulders. The water is rushing against me just below my belt. I am a new log in this water. I am welcome debris, a foreign object. When I look back at my belongings on and near the chair where I was sitting, when I was sitting beside this river, I can see the metaphor that I have been. It’s clearer now from here. I have been beside myself for a long time. Beside myself, like when I was beside my mom. I have been beside myself my entire life. I was beside myself throughout college, sitting on the quad beside that white bark tree, contemplating whether I should be alive. I was beside myself at the beach, thinking about whether I would ever matter to anyone, ever be in love. Beside myself singing along with Prince as if I could also be as interesting and upsetting as him. I was beside myself at the police station as a teen, trying to understand how I went from curious and brave to handcuffed and ridiculed. I have been beside myself my entire life. But not now. That’s not me over there piled on that chair. I am here, not beside anymore. I am in this river. I am standing, and I am standing determinedly against the current, choosing this. Doing this. Then, I drop. I take a deep breath and drop. I go under and blow it out underwater so that the water will carry it away with my passivity down river, and then I come up, breathe more deeply, fill my lungs as if for the first time. I am soaking wet and freezing cold, but I am exactly and precisely me. And, maybe, Mom and Grandma and Jesus are watching though I don’t really care that much what they think, no more than I care if anyone from the coffee shop has watched any of this.
When Mom died, my whole family was beside her, our worlds crumbling at the same time in different ways. One cried while comforting her dead body. One cried while sitting in a position like praying. One cried and gently brushed the back of another one who cried. We all cried, and I got dressed to go to work. I had to work. It seemed easier in that hollow moment to leave myself sitting there beside everyone and go mindlessly, heartlessly to work. And that’s what I did and have been doing ever since. That is why, sitting here in the sunshine, drying and shivering, knowing the river is still in my shoes and pockets and collar, I cry. I don’t know or wonder why I am crying except that it feels long overdue, and this sadness feels natural and big like a sudden storm that drops everything it has all at once and changes from an enormous, dark, hovering cloud into a swollen, rolling river, raging but well within itself, full of life and direction.