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river rat: R cubed
For the first time in my lifetime, my father's and his sister's families came together at our cousin Margaret's river house for the purposes of celebrating all of us who are still living. My aunt is 16 years older than Dad and still sharp as a tack. She carries herself with more grace at 93 than any european royalty could ever hope to achieve over a hundred generations, and I wish there had been some way to better split my time speaking with her and playing in the water with Adam. I wanted to find out all she could recall about my father as a boy and hear her best recounting of life when she was a little girl, but that damn river got its hooks in me and son-of-a-bitch if the day didn't evaporate with me standing in water up to my knees catching crawdads and skipping stones. I believe we exchanged fewer than fifty words and none of the conversation threatened to reach further into the past than when she recently lost her driver's license.
When we first arrived at the cottage, Adam dragged his mother to the water and that pretty much sealed my fate for the duration of a perfect summer day. Liza was deposited with the womenfolk where she was doted over as Traci and I changed places and I waded Adam into the water. By the end of the day there was nothing left of me but a ragged arm and stiff back.
Not that I'm complaining-the day was glorious in every way-perfect temperature, almost no clouds, a cool breeze blowing up the river. We couldn't have hoped for better, and for my son's first baptism in water I consider holy, I couldn't imagine a happier set of memories for him. His only stresses that day were when we dragged him kicking and screaming from the water to eat, pee, and then go home. He's truly got the bug for swimming, especially in the river, and was a delight to watch chasing his minnows and his crayfish in his river. I'm making a scrap book of his first trip to his dad's hometown so that he can see and read what he was like at two years old. I wish I had something like that, even a picture or two of me at the water, from that age.
As far as I can tell, everyone got along just fine. No one gave our oldest brother shit about the beaver he calls a toupe perched on his noggin and none of my siblings got into it about how we were so piss poor at keeping in touch. I didn't catch much of the conversation except between refills of juice bottles and restocking my pants with bottles of beer. I'm told that Dad and his sister and our cousins enjoyed much reminiscing about river adventures. Many of the stories were told for the gajillionth time and, as the words tumbled slowly from their mouths, all those who could hear were held in glassy-eyed rapturous longing for the simpler portraits of life our elders painted.
Liza won't remember how she held court over the grassy lawn leading to the water. She acted with all the indifferent joy of a well-served empress awaiting her barge.
