Driving, I’ve got Copland’s Fanfare filling the interior space at ten thirty. I bought the whole oeuvre online. As always, I’m stirred by the opening oboes giving ground to the strings then the kettle drums and the double basses. It’s a high-sky morning in Wyoming. Joel McCrea’s galloping across a windy prairie. Barbara Britton, fresh from Vermont, stands out front of their sodbuster cabin. Why is he so late? Is there trouble? What can I do, a woman alone? I’ve worn out three disks this fall. Almost any Copland (today it’s the Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by some Israeli) can persuade me on almost any given day that I’m not just any old man doing something old men do: driving to the grocery for soy milk, visiting the periodontist, motoring to the airport to greet young soldiers — sometimes against their wills. It doesn’t take much to change my perspective on a given day — or a given moment, or a given anything. Sally slipped a Copland in my Christmas stocking a year ago (Billy the Kid), and it’s had positive effects. I bought The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there — though I need to.
I haven’t had time to look up Arnie Urquhart’s home-sale paperwork from ’04—whether he financed, if he took a balloon, or just peeled bills off a fat wad. I, of course, ought to remember the transaction, since it was my house, and I pocketed the dough — used to finance our house in Haddam, with plenty left over. Though like a lot of things I should do, I often don’t. It’s not true that as you get older things slide away like molasses off a table top. What is true is I don’t remember some things that well, owing to the fact that I don’t care all that much. I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about “thirty days hath September…” This, I believe, is normal and doesn’t worry me. It’s not as if I put my trousers on backwards every morning, tie my shoelaces together, and can’t find my way to the mailbox. My only persistent bother is an occasionally painful subluxation (a keeper word) in my C-3 and C-4. It causes me to feel “Rice Krispies” in my neck, plus an ache when I twist back and forth, so that I don’t do that as much. I fear it may be restricting signals to my brain. My orthopedist at Haddam Medical, Dr. Zippee (a Pakistani and a prime asshole), asked if I wanted him to order up “some blood work” to find out if I’m a candidate for Alzheimer’s. (It made him gleeful to suggest this.) “Thanks, but I guess not,” I said, standing in his tiny green cubicle in a freezing-ass, flower-print examination gown. “I’m not sure what I’d do with the information.” “You’d probably forget it,” he said, gloating. He’s also told me that a usually unobserved vertical crease down the earlobe is a “good marker” for heart disease. I, of course, have one, though it isn’t deep — which I hope is a positive sign.
My view of the “Big A,” though — should I ever have it — is that it quickly becomes its own comfort zone and is not as bad as it’s billed. Dr. Zippee, who attended med school in Karachi and interned down at Hopkins, travels back to the old country every winter to work in a madrassa (whatever that is). He complains to me that America, in its vengeful zeal to run the world, has ruined life where he came from; that the Taliban started out as good guys who were on our side. But now, thanks to us, the streets aren’t safe at night. I tell him, to me Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, like Israelis and Arabs, and northern and southern Irishmen. Religion’s just their excuse to maim and incinerate each other — otherwise they’d die of boredom. “Awesome,” he says and laughs like a chimp. He’s recently bought a cottage on Mount Desert and hopes soon to leave New Jersey behind. In his view, life is about pain management, and I need to do a better job managing mine.
Copland’s soaring as I make it out onto the bridge. Barnegat Bay, this morning, is a sea of sequins the wind plays over, with the long island and Seaside Heights out ahead, appearing, in a moment of spearing sunlight, to be unchanged. Gulls are towering. A few tiny numbered sails are dimpling far out on a gusty land breeze. The temperature’s topped out at thirty-five. You’d need to be a show-off to be on the water. I’m certain I’m dressed too lightly, though I’m elated to be back at The Shore, even to face disaster. Our true emotions are never conventional.
An Air-Tran — one of the old vibrator 737s — is just nosing up from Atlantic City into the low, gray ceiling, full of sleepy gamblers, headed back to Milwaukee. I can make out the lowercase “a” on its tail, as it disappears into the fog off the ocean side where my old house once sat, but apparently sits no more.
LATER YESTERDAY MORNING, AFTER I SPOKE TO Arnie, Sally came downstairs to where I was eating my All-Bran, and stood staring, musing through the window into the back yard at the late-autumn squirrel activity. I was pleased to be thinking nothing worth recording, not about Arnie Urquhart, just breathing to the cadence of my chews. After a while of not speaking, she sat down across from me, holding a book I’d noticed her reading late into the night — her light stayed on after I’d gone to sleep, then was switched off, then on again later. It’s not unusual for people our age.
“I read this shocking thing last night.” She held the book she’d been engrossed by, clutched to her yoga shirt. Her eyes were intent. She seemed worried. I couldn’t make out the book’s spine but understood she meant to tell me about it.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Well.” She pursed her lips. “Back in 1862, right when the Civil War was in full swing, the U.S. Cavalry had time to put down an Indian revolt in Minnesota. Did you know that?”
“I did,” I said. “The Dakota uprising. It’s pretty famous.”
“Okay. You know about it. I didn’t.”
“I know some things,” I said and stared down at a banana slice.
“Okay. But. In December of 1862, our government hanged thirty-eight Sioux warriors on one big scaffold. Just did it all at once.”
“That’s famous, too,” I said. “Supposedly they’d massacred eight hundred white people. Not that that’s an excuse.”
Sally took in a breath and turned her head away in a manner to indicate a tear she didn’t want seen might be wobbling out of her eyes. “But do you know what they said?” These words were nearly choked with throat-clogging emotion.
“What who said?”
“The Indians. They all began shouting out as they were standing on the gallows, waiting to drop and never speak again.”
I didn’t know. But I looked up to let her understand I realized this was important to her, and that the next thing she said would be important to me. Possibly my spoon had paused on its upward arc toward my mouth. I may have shaken my head in amazement.