#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Menemsha Morning
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
Awake early after enough sleep. Lovely. And the dogs patient. And the air warm and inviting, and the climb up the dirt road, easy and un-busy, and the trail, a slow descent, fragrant and dry, and the dogs cheerful. We meet one person: a woman running, friendly in the early morning, just us. We reach the beach, the Sound is calm and the sky is bright and the sand is rock-strewn, and I feel quiet and reverent, surf-silenced, holy in the Sunday morning beach-church, in the fish, gull-strung air. Thinking about the reddish heart stone I found on my first walk Friday and Frank’s heart and how it was stopped for hours during his operation, and how in a day of health it cannot be stopped, his generous heart, his giving heart, his heart at our home on the phone with his Sunday morning men and women from back home, his early risers, his sobriety seekers, how he won’t miss his group this morning he has so much to give that has been given to him, and he walks his talk. The dogs wait while I dip at the great rock, its so chilly fresh and calm and quiet and wide open and there is no distraction from this peace for these moments, here, now. Then I am thinking about my father and all my affection for him and where to put it, there is nowhere to thank it, he is gone, and the affection lives and breathes; this was very remarkable about him. His ability to always inspire a deep affection in others. Flawless, he was not. I loved him in such a different way from my mother, with an intensity and clarity and joy. Still do. How did I get here, I wonder? We head back over the rocks and the rocks and the rocks and my feet are bending easily now in the arch over the stones, conditioning. We have been gone now almost two hours and I think: I will go to the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival this morning after all, straight away, I suddenly don’t want to miss going. It’s a five minute ride, so I shower quickly and take my coffee and park in the pony field in the center where all the book lovers are parking and under a white tent I listen to Jim Acosta from CNN talk about his book and the dangers to the press in the Trump era; and then I go into the Chilmark Community Center and listen to a young, an amazingly young chef, Kwame Onwuschi, talk about being brought up by a single mother who started a catering business in her home so she could spend time with him and his sister and the trouble he got into and finally got out of; and then I listened to Dani Shapiro right after, brilliantly talking about her memoir of discovering late in life that her beloved father was not her birth father, and she was actually fathered biologically by a sperm donor, and this made me think hard about whether that could happen to me? Could I have been fathered by someone other than my father? But no, I know my father was my biological father, know it down to the very roots of my soul, I don’t doubt it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t secrets and unknown things that have shaped me without me being consciously aware of them. No, no, it doesn’t mean that at all. People are flawed, love is flawed. On Lucy Vincent Beach my brother joins us for the afternoon and he suggests we read a short story as we like to do, and I say, let’s listen to the Olive Kittredge story in the New Yorker that I listened to yesterday, “Motherless Child,” and there in the hot sun by the surf and the clay cliffs we listen together. And he loves the story too. And we get up and go down the lovely chilly surf and talk about the story and dive in deep.
Jim Acosta
The Enemy of the People
Chef Kwame Onwuachi
Notes from a Young Black Chef
Dani Shapiro
Inheritance
