Getting comfortable on the floor, I face a two-shelf bookcase in my dad’s assisted-living apartment, looking for one of his books to keep as he has moved. Pulling out a pale grey cover displaying a distant, low hill beyond a bay and angling toward it, an Adirondack chair on a dock, I read A PARTING GIFT by Ben Ericson, and feel expectant as I know this is the one. Thumbing through the book and scanning the chapter titles, I find words that I own for what matters to me: “Letters Home,” “Red Sky At Morning,” “One Small Pebble,” and turning to the back cover, an excerpt of final persuasion.
I read this book every year for its relationship between eighty-four-year-old Mr. Davis and Josh, a high school student who delivers his meals. “I’ve lived a full life, but I’ve yet to tell the stories that are in my heart,” Mr. Davis tells Josh, then asks him if he will come by every day to write down those memories. As Mr. Davis remembers Father Bender’s speech, Josh writes, “It’s up to you to find the determination.… To take your thoughts and put them down on paper breathing life into them.… When things go well, the words will seem to write themselves.” Giving a direction to write an essay or a short story, Father Bender picked up the chalk and wrote the persuasive line, “God is in the details.”
It is late afternoon as I walk a short distance across the field, sneakers crunching the stubbly beard fall makes of grasses in this area of Florida. With a friendly glance at certain trees, the loquat and black mission fig, the hickory at the woods’ edge where the red bird’s apt to sing, I count the three two-board planks going up to the deck of the meditation studio. Mature bushes of almond-shaped leaves, green except for the new red ones, shoulder a secluded spot to read or just look. A metal chair has its back slightly tilted toward the tall glass-paned doors. The open one briefly draws my gaze into the dim cool with its faint odor of cedar-built walls that cause me to deepen my breathing whenever I enter. I turn back to the old field, neglected and tired from years of a garden, now long gone, a peach orchard not even in stumps, and the trunks of the pear trees (some laden with fruit) hidden by unmown grasses. Deer are happy here, I muse. Alone this visit, I sit on the thick cushions, gold when first sewn, but now looking acceptably used. I open my book but don’t read—cross one leg over the over and look toward the barely visible remains of a bee hive tumbled and left, shadows under trees making openings into woods, and then slowly, swinging my head to look in the other direction, at two southern pines, yellow jasmine entwining them. My eyes finally rest on three squat trees made distinctive by each one being a little taller than the one next to it. As the sky loses color, a dragonfly alights on my leg—four wings to watch as I keep still. We spend long minutes aware of one another in a routine of its landing, flying off and then returning. Amused (and amazed), I count the number of times it lands, until at twenty-seven I uncross my legs and stretch.
My realization is, “To remember requires having looked. To write requires describing images that may transform from what was seen to what was behind the seeing, holding the moment within us.”