“In the beginning…”

“When in the course of human events…”

“Four score and seven years ago…”

Just as one delicious first bite predicts a feast, or the first fat drops of rain or gentle gust of wind portends the storm, so, too, every good vacation requires a memorable beginning…

Welcome to the first day of beach week, my extended family’s annual celebration of sea, sand, and sun. It’s dreamed of for months, planned for weeks, discussed for days. In the hours leading up to it, last minute invitations are issued; supplies start to stack up; contingencies are considered; cars are crammed with every possible item anyone might want or need for the big show. It’s one long drum roll, an opening salvo worthy of war, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at full blast. And then, as if on some mysterious migratory cue, we all set off from our various points of origin, bound for one common seasonal destination: Rehoboth, Delaware, the North Shores end, to be precise.

Beach chairs, boogie boards, bathing suits, buckets, and bikes. Umbrellas, golf clubs, flip-flops, enough food to feed an army, enough clothes to stock a department store, enough toys and games to keep the kids occupied should—horror of horrors!—the sun refuse to shine for an hour or two.

Our numbers are down this year. A hangover from the pandemic? Supply chain issues? Staff shortages? When I count, I get a different number every time, but the roster hovers somewhere between forty and forty-two, spread out over five rented houses. When we begin to congregate, it sounds like most of the brood are under the age of nine, but in truth, it’s about an even fifty-fifty split between adults and kids: siblings, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, in-laws and outlaws. Even though the matriarch may no longer be present, she’s still with us in spirit, enthroned in an empty beach chair, Elijah at the Seder.

There’s never a dull moment, nor a quiet one, for that matter. POTUS may be in town (and he is!), but our first trek to the beach requires a motorcade just as long and noisy as his. Some people carry coal to Newcastle, but we bring a baby pool to the beach for the littlest ones. Our sturdy beach wagons carve deep ruts in the sand. There are Yeti coolers full of sodas and Gatorade and beer; designer beach bags for the sandwiches and salads and sunscreen, an alliterative arrangement of what anyone between the ages of two and seventy-five might require to survive one long day’s journey from sunup to sundown, every day for a single week that soon begins to feel like a month or even a year.

Today, lifeguards will shudder when we arrive and breathe a sigh of relief when we depart. The beach will resound with shrieks of delight and tears of despair, fortunately a million more of the former than the latter. There will be jokes and trice-told tales, dips and naps, even our own version of the Olympics for three teams of future athletes under the age of twelve.

At the end of this sunburned first day, the plan is to retreat to our separate houses, but if history is any kind of indicator, there will inevitably be more than a few late-night inter-house visits. Tomorrow, we’ll all pitch in for an intergenerational smorgasbord on the sand: savory dishes for palettes of all ages, chicken nuggets for the kids, spiced shrimp and pulled pork sliders with homemade coleslaw for the grownups.

First day down, six more to go. In the days to come, patience might wane from time to time, but memories that last forever will be made. Me? I’m channeling Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times…”

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

 

 

 

There I am, back row center, with my fourth grade teacher and classmates at St. Edmund’s Academy in Pittsburgh. The photo was taken almost sixty-five years ago, and much to my surprise, I can still remember everyone’s name. How can that be when I struggle to remember a password I created last week or the dream I had last night?

Memory is a fickle friend: here today, gone tomorrow. I’d like to think my own memory is still reasonably sharp, but I can’t help but wonder why some memories stick and others fall off the cliff. I’m sure there’s a genetic component to memory, but beyond the good genes that have been passed down to me by a slew of ancestors I never knew, what else is at work holding the past in focus?

I’m pretty sure it’s not that over-the-counter pill that’s shilled every night on television. Nor is it the next fad diet or chair yoga or planetary alignment. More likely, memory is linked to brain chemistry. We experience an event, a person, or a place, and that encounter leaves an impression on us—good, bad, or neutral—not unlike a photographer’s ghostly negative. We file it away in a dusty drawer somewhere in the attic of our brain only to retrieve it when some external stimulus pries it loose—like when that old class photo suddenly popped up on my phone.

I haven’t seen any of those fourth grade friends in years, yet every face has a name and a memory. There’s a lesson in this: the impression we make today has the potential to make a lasting memory tomorrow. Let that thought sink in. And if that’s true, then isn’t it incumbent on us to make sure that every word we utter, every person we encounter, every footprint we leave is as positive as possible? I realize that’s far easier said than done, but it’s a worthy goal and these days, we need all the worthy goals we can collect.

Memories come in many different shapes and sizes: long-term and short-term; episodic, sensory, semantic, implicit, explicit. Memories are a moving target: sometimes, we’re able to retrieve them, sometimes, they escape our grasp. We can be prisoners of our memories or we can bask in the glow of their warmth. Memories are, by definition, shadows of the past, but they color our present and shape our future. All the more reason to cultivate the good ones and weed out the bad ones.

As for the balance sheet of my own memories, I rue a few and treasure many. I’d like to think that my bad memories have at least been instructive: my personal history of mistakes doesn’t need repeating. Or maybe memory is the tiller that will steer into the future and keep me on course. At the very least, my memories keep me in touch with my past and that, in itself, can inform my future.

Fourth grade may be long gone, but learning never ends. Mrs. Sussman was my teacher that long-ago year. Memory teaches me today.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

 

Of all the questions that get asked around our house, the most imponderable is “What do you want for dinner?” Sometimes the problem is that the question gets asked right after breakfast and at that moment, who knows what one wants for dinner? Surely not me. I’m not genetically inclined to think that far ahead; a lot can happen between breakfast and dinner. And should the question get asked right after lunch, it’s even more problematic: dinner is only a few hours away, and right now, I’m full. You want to eat again? Already??

I realize this is a first-world problem. Back in my Peace Corps days, I never took dinner for granted. Sometimes there was meat at the butcher shop (you knew what was available by the severed beast head that hung above the butcher’s stall) or maybe I could find a few fresh vegetables in the open-air market. Sometimes not. I was grateful for whatever I was able to discover or afford. Mind you, there was no refrigeration so I couldn’t just go pull something out of the freezer. Now when I open the freezer drawer and see all the Trader Joe’s goodness lying in wait there, I can’t decide if I want Orange Chicken or Mongolian Potstickers. Dinner has become an international dilemma.

The problem is compounded because I live within a stone’s throw of the Health Food store and the Wine and Cheese Shop. I can afford to wait until almost the last minute to decide what I’ll prepare. That works on the occasional day when I’m “batching” it, but when my wife and I are wrestling with the dinner dilemma, it’s not so easy. I like spicy; she doesn’t. She has super-sensitive taste buds; I’m pretty pedantic about food. I’ve learned to defer to her culinary art because a) she’s a good cook, and b) I’m easy to please.

The other day, she had a business obligation so I was on my own for dinner. About 4:45 (the Wine and Cheese Shop closes at 5), I trotted over across the street, dove into the freezer case, and came out with some veal tortellini from a fancy Philadelphia purveyor. (That was never part of my Peace Corps playlist.) Back in my kitchen, I added some crumbled feta cheese, a diced heirloom tomato, some pesto (I love pesto!) and, for garnish, some fresh basil snipped from one of our backyard herb pots. Much to my surprise, paired with a glass of rosé wine, it was delicious! I was in heaven. I called the concoction “self-care” and I ate it in front of the tv, watching a baseball game. Life was good—at least for that moment. But when I finished, I asked myself, “Now what?” Loneliness is like that—it can sneak up on you and bop you on the head. I washed the dishes and headed upstairs for a little bedtime reading. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t mind making dinner for myself or eating alone for an evening or two, but life is a string of evenings and I miss it when my wife and I aren’t together. As much as we wrestle over the what-do-you-want-for-dinner question, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a worthwhile conversation to have. We’re lucky: I’m sure the brave people in Ukraine don’t have the luxury of deciding what to eat; they’re just trying to stay alive until tomorrow morning. Life is context; we forget that truth at our own peril.

That’s all for now. I’m off to make dinner. Hmmm…I wonder what’s in the freezer. Bon appetit!

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

Despite all indications to the contrary, the universe is still unfolding exactly according to plan. Even though nothing else seems to be going right, I am beyond awed by the images coming to us from the James Webb Space Telescope: infinite time and space, dazzling nebulae, proof positive that Carl Sagan wasn’t kidding when he told us about “billions and billions” of stars. And that’s just the beginning. The seemingly limitless wonders of the universe doesn’t solve any of our earthly problems; it just renders them fundamentally insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Like many of us who watched The Open Championship last weekend, I wanted Rory to win. He seems like such a likable, thoughtful, honest, and humble young man, a golfer of prodigious skill who somehow manages to keep everything in perspective. And yet he didn’t win. He was bested on Sunday by an equally proficient golfer and, on that particular day, a better putter. Disappointed as I was, I had to tip my own hat to Cam Smith. The universe is unfolding exactly according to plan.

This morning, I awoke to three breaking news stories: the surprise wedding of Bennifer in Las Vegas, the massive failure of law enforcement in Uvalde, Texas, and the impending testimony of that bleary-eyed and unshaven mugshot, Steve Bannon, before the January 6 committee. None of those stories did much to get my day off to a good start, but I’m not the issue here. The universe is unfolding on schedule and exactly according to plan.

Our human impulse is to make everything anthropomorphic, solipsistic. We put ourselves in the center of everything. But the JWST does away with all that. We’re on the marginal periphery of cosmic events, if even that. Moreover, there may be no center. If the universe is ever-expanding, constantly dying and being reborn, then there is no beginning or ending, no moment of inertia, not even a big bang. As for us, our own little planet, our entire solar system, is not even a grain of sand in the Gobi Desert. We’re not even an afterthought. We just are. The universe is unfolding exactly according to plan.

Of course, true as this may be, the evidence of our own insignificance does not absolve us of our responsibility to strive to do better: to fight for justice, to protect our planet, to solve the riddle of this pandemic, to rebuild our ailing economy. To right wrongs. Not only to save what we have, but to make it better. These are not insignificant or meaningless earthly tasks; they are what we must do, even if the universe is unfolding exactly according to plan.

Think about this: it’s even possible that these small human tasks are part of the plan. If all politics is local, then maybe we have to begin by taking better care of each other. If we do only that, then don’t we become part of the plan, too? I never said the universe was random, only that it was unfolding exactly according to plan.

I understand that this Musing begs of the question of “Whose plan?” Is there a divine author or prime architect, or is the universe just one grand, never-ending scientific experiment run amok? Does that even matter? No matter one’s perspective on this most basic of questions, it seems to me that it’s up to us to make sure the universe continues to unfold exactly according to plan.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

 

We are a nation of immigrants; we all come from somewhere. Even Native Americans probably walked here from Asia across a land bridge during the Ice Age, long before anyone else thought to arrive on this continent in sailing ships, free or forced. I’m Scottish on my father’s side and my great-times-seven grandfather arrived here in 1763. My mother’s Dutch ancestors have been here longer than that, settling in and around Manhattan. So heritage matters to me.

But those are other stories. This story is about a simple houseplant: Plectranthus verticillatus, more commonly known as Swedish ivy. First of all, Swedish ivy is neither: neither Swedish nor ivy. It doesn’t cling to walls, and it’s not from Sweden. In fact, it’s native to South Africa. At some point, it made its way across the Atlantic, probably first arriving in South or Central America. From there, it migrated on to Hawaii and Australia. Today, it’s a ubiquitous ornamental house plant with green trailing leaves, easy to grow and to care for. It doesn’t need a lot of sunlight so it’s a perfect indoor plant that even thrives in winter.

But that’s not this particular story. Last week, some Swedish ivy arrived anonymously on my porch in the form of cuttings, tendril roots dangling in water in an old milk bottle. I had a good idea who had left the cuttings on the porch, and while I was grateful for the gift, I wondered why I was the beneficiary.  Now I know.

It appears that for many years, Swedish ivy has graced the mantle of the Oval Office in the White House.  The original plant might have been given to President John F. Kennedy in 1961. I’ve tracked down a photo of a plant being presented to a White House aide but no one—not even the JFK library in Boston—has ever been able to positively identify either the donor or the specific plant. However, at some point soon thereafter, pots of Swedish ivy began to appear on the mantle of the Oval Office and can be seen in photographs taken during subsequent administrations. I know President Clinton admired the plant and so did President Bush.  At some point, it became a tradition to give aides, interns, and White House workers clippings of the Oval Office Swedish ivy which they could then grow and pass on to family and friends.

Now we’re getting closer to the heart of this story. As I understand it, the Swedish ivy clippings that appeared on my porch came from one of the plants that stood watch over President Obama during his eight years in office. Passed along to me by a chain of friendly hands, a few days ago, I carefully replanted the cuttings in a large blue ceramic pot, and a week into their new and much less modest location on the front porch, my Swedish ivy appears to be thriving. How wonderful it is to have a living link to those happier days. In the language of that era, it gives me hope!

Remember: we all come from somewhere. Although I can’t really be sure how or when the ancestor of my new plant got to the Oval Office, by my count, the stubborn little green shrub has survived and even thrived through perhaps as many as eleven previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat. Moreover, I have it on good authority that there’s still Swedish ivy atop the mantel in President Biden’s Oval Office; that’s good, because it has an important job to do. You see, Swedish ivy, like its more traditional ivy cousins, represents many things, among them eternity, fidelity, commitment, and loyalty. I’d like to think that all the men and women who are gathering in the Oval Office during these difficult days can breathe in some of those very same qualities and put them to work for the common good. That, too, gives me hope.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.

Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

This photograph haunts me. It came to me out of the blue, sent by an old pal I haven’t seen in over fifty years. The light is diffuse, almost ethereal; it looks more like a painting than a photograph. It must have been taken in that dreamtime before cell phones, when cameras were really cameras and you had to send a roll film off to be developed. The images would come back a week or two later, 3×5 or 4×6 snapshots, but by then, the moment was already a memory. Little did I know…

I have no specific memory of this moment, but I can tell that’s me—fifty years younger and sixty pounds lighter—sitting in that bleached rowboat, looking back at my now-self. My hair is thick and tousled; my Fu Manchu mustache is faintly visible. I’m not sure exactly where I was when the photograph was taken: Tunisia certainly (I was in the Peace Corps there), maybe relaxing in one of the benign little sea-side towns: Hammamet or Tabarka or Monastir, far away from my little village in the remnants of the Atlas Mountains, close to the Algerian border. There’s a shallow tidal pool, the edge of what appears to be an abandoned building, and, off in the distance, a boat rigged with a lateen sail. That would make sense: lateen sails were an Arab invention. They are triangular, mounted on the mast at an angle, running in a fore-and-aft direction. They were likely first developed by Arab traders in the eastern Mediterranean in the Second Century, and were crucial in the development of ships that were maneuverable and reliable under sail power alone because they allowed vessels to tack against the wind. Lateen sails changed the world.

The more I think about this photo, the more blurred it becomes. Most everything that has been important to me in this life was still to come: marriages, children and grandchildren, friendships, careers. Wins and losses, successes and blunders. I had no clue what lay ahead. If I could wade out to that little boat now and talk to that skinny kid, what would I say? Don’t fret; it will all be OK? I’m not sure I’d be telling him the truth. 

I feel gut-punched. My faith has been shaken by recent events: the political chasms that continue to divide us, sorrowful Supreme Court rulings, this lingering pandemic, our ailing economy, the degradation of the environment, racial injustice, gender bias; the list goes on and on. I said to my wife yesterday that I feel weary in my bones. I meant it. I wish for simpler, happier times. I believe we all do. But that’s not the way of this world. Like the young buck sitting in that rowboat, those days are gone. There’s work to be done and time is running out. Let’s get on with it.

What happens next? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. There was a time when I trusted the world to be good, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe this feeling will pass, pass like the years that have passed since that photo was taken. None of us can ever be that young again. It’s just good to know that once I was.

We know how to tack against the wind. There’s still time to change the world.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.net.

 

Once—not all that long ago—we were a great nation: confident, aspirational, perhaps even blessed. A shining city, set upon a hill. But now it seems to me the sun is setting on America. We’re torn and tired, sad and angry, divided, lost, maybe even defeated. Is our day done or is there still a little daylight remaining? We’ll know soon enough.

We did this to ourselves. Six years ago, we elected a flawed man of questionable character who remade the Supreme Court with ideologues of his ilk, three newly minted justices who lack the experience, temperament, and intellectual gravitas to make thoughtful, centrist judicial decisions. In so doing, Mr. Trump and his GOP minions made the Supreme Court, at least in Constitutional theory, the only non-partisan branch of our government, into a vengeful political weapon. Equal justice under law? Not anymore. The decisions of this court only seek to further an extreme political agenda that runs against the grain of a majority of Americans who believe that guns should be regulated, that a woman has the right to choose, and that love is love. 

There is no true north anymore; our collective moral compass spins wildly. We are polarized, paralyzed. We separate into tribes and reorganize in the wings, farther and farther from any common ground. Just over a hundred years ago, William Butler Yeats predicted all this in his poem “The Second Coming,” written coincidentally in the aftermath of another global pandemic:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

When I was younger, I was a patently cheerful optimist. But now that I’m older, I see things differently. It took several centuries for the Roman Empire to decline and eventually fall, leaving the Western World in darkness. Barbarian threats from without, political instability and corruption from within, a failing economy, and the rise of other empires slowly eroded the power and sway of Rome, eventually causing it to collapse. More recently and much closer to home, there was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire, but within only a century or two, that empire also shrunk and disappeared, writing one more painful chapter in history’s long textbook.

These days, events move more swiftly; the slope is much steeper. The evening of America—if that is indeed what this moment is—might only last a few short years. I would like to think there’s still time to right our ship, but it sure feels like the tide is running fast and the wind is blowing hard. I’m worried.

But over on the horizon, there is still that small glimmer of light. Maybe there’s still time to get this right. We have to ask ourselves if we have the will, the resolve, and the patience to maintain our place in this world. We like to think of ourselves as a great experiment in the power of democracy, an ideal for others to emulate, but I’m sorry to say we’re looking less and less like that shining city set upon a hill. Yeats was right: things are falling apart.

I sound like Eeyore: “things could be worse, but I’m not sure how.” I’ll do my best to rekindle my faith in America. Will you do the same? Maybe it isn’t the evening of America, only the darkness before the dawn.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.  Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. 

 

Greetings from Colorado! We’re here to help celebrate a marriage and to get a glimpse of two grandkids we haven’t seen in four long years, thanks to Covid.

I won’t lie: travel is stressful these days. Better believe it: America is on the move again. Airports and planes are jam-packed and flight schedules can change on a whim. We had a shaky start: our departing flight was delayed and we almost missed our connection in Chicago, but miraculously we—and even our bags— arrived in Denver on time. We rented a car and headed off to Colorado Springs.

It’s different out here. The days are sunny and warm but there’s almost no humidity. The nights are cool and fresh. The land is open, vast, almost endless. The mountains stand sentinel over everything and the air is pine-scented. The people are different, too: they seem happy, relaxed, informal, and outdoorsy. They wear cowboy boots and hats, or sport mountain casual: Patagonia shorts or cargo pants, SPF shirts with lots of pockets, and Birkenstocks with socks. They’re drawn here by the weather, opportunities, even the lifestyle. But it’s a devil’s bargain: on our way south, we pass through acres of new tract housing. We drive at 75 mph along miles of new highways. We see countless new office complexes, industrial parks, shopping malls, and enormous box stores. The taint of urban sprawl. John Denver saw this coming as long ago as 1972 when he wrote Rocky Mountain High: “more people, more scars upon the land.” And now, climate accelerates the changes: the plains and forests grow more sere each season, many reservoirs are at record low levels, and a smokey haze from wild fires hangs like a shroud in the air. Our planetary clock ticks loudly here.

On our first full day, we (my wife and I along with two good friends) were happy tourists: a morning visit to the Garden of the Gods, an afternoon round of golf at the Air Force Academy, evening drinks and dinner at the Broadmoor. The following day, we climbed Pike’s Peak—by car of course—but that didn’t make it any less nerve wracking: twenty uphill miles winding through hairpin turns with few guardrails, eventually soaring eagle-like high above the tree line. At the summit (14,115 feet), we were dizzy and lightheaded, our lungs were working overtime. But the view was worth it. It was the same view that inspired Katherine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful” in 1893. From up here, America, despite her many faults and flaws, is beautiful indeed: her skies are still spacious, her purple mountains still majestic, and yes, from atop this peak, it seems as though you really can see from sea to shining sea.

We carefully made our way back down the mountain and headed off to Denver to begin our wedding fun. There’s no doubt that the modern American wedding has become quite a production these days. There is, first, the choice of destination; I guess no one ever gets married in their backyard anymore. Then, there is the wedding venue itself: in this case, a lush meadow overlooking a peaceful green valley rising into the foothills of the Rockies. Clouds scurry by and there is even a drop or two of rain, but just as the wedding party comes down the grassy aisle to the strains of “Here Comes The Sun,” the raindrops disappear and the sun magically comes out. I thought I heard the wedding planner breathe a huge sigh of relief.

What a beautiful, happy event! The wedding party, the flower girl, the two well-behaved golden retrievers, the proud parents of the bride and groom, and, of course, the stars of the show: the happy couple themselves. Their vows were unscripted and sincere; their smiles radiated love and gratitude. Marriages are promises made and I have no doubt these promises will be kept forever.

After all the stress of planning, the moment finally arrived and a new husband kissed his bride. Let’s get this party started! We settled in to dine and dance. The toasts were marvelous: the father of the bride brought everyone to tears with his loving tribute to his newly married daughter, the two maids of honor took us behind the scenes of the newlyweds’ first tentative courting steps, and the best man, the groom’s older brother, hilariously captured the rough-and-tumble of brothers growing up in the embrace of a loving family. We should all be so fortunate.

Once all the wedding festivities were over, we made time for family. We connected with our recently relocated niece and nephew for lunch up in the foothills. The following day, it was time for the icing on our Colorado cake: the long-awaited reunion with my son and daughter-in-law and their two children—our grandkids. It had been four, long years since we last hugged the boys; they were little tykes then, but no longer. How grand to see and spend time with our two big, beautiful Colorado boys and their parents!

Sometimes, expectation exceeds experience. Not this time. We head for home tomorrow, so, as I’m wont to say…

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

A pair of house finches are eyeing the hanging basket that sways over our front porch: wary, little locals looking for a new home. The gentlest breeze rustles a few leaves on the sycamore just beyond the picket fence. No cars move up or down the street, quite a contrast to yesterday’s busy Farmers Market morning. My first sip of coffee…

Around the corner, down the street, across the bridge, the world continues to turn: a Congressional committee deliberates past transgressions; men, women, and children march against gun violence; glaciers melt and seas rise. But here, in this single, silent moment, all is calm, all is bright.

In a couple of days, my wife and I will be on an airplane, flying over vast plains on our way to Colorado. We’ll be there a week: a wedding, time with friends, a glimpse of grandchildren we haven’t seen in three years. I rue the hassle of travel these days, but in this case, the results may well be worth it. I hope so, anyway. Nothing is certain anymore.

Yesterday, I attended a memorial service for a friend and mentor who passed away in January. He used to live nearby, but in the wake of the 2016 election, he and his wife moved to a quieter, safer place a thousand miles or more away. I never saw him again. But yesterday, he came rushing back to me, vital and quirky, vulgar and funny as ever. Three speakers brought him back to life and then several other good folk who knew him well were moved to embellish him, Quaker-like, forming him from the silence of a room in the literary house he had helped to establish. I wanted to say something, but didn’t. Sometimes, less is more, and those who spoke knew him better than I. Well, maybe just longer, not necessarily better. Just so you know, I miss him, too.

I’m glad I don’t have a crystal ball. I worry for us. I prefer to live in hope because it’s better than despair. When I consider my part in all this, I fret, then come to the conclusion that I just need to keep learning my lines and perfecting my performance. I make small changes because there isn’t time for major ones anymore. Step-by-step, day-by-day, and if I’m lucky, year-by-year.

Those house finches are still watching me, wondering if I would make a good landlord. I tell them they would be welcome tenants, but that’s only a half-truth. Another pair nested in a hanging basket a few years ago which made it impossible to water the plants. By the time the chicks hatched and fledged, the plants in the basket were all long since dead. Nevertheless, I like to think it made a good launching pad. Who knows? Maybe this pair are returning to a home one of them once knew. We’re all just flying through this thin air, over rivers, plains, and mountains, each of us on our solitary, singular way from alpha to omega.

Colorado beckons. I pack lightly, but my wife moves wardrobes. She tells me to mind my own business; she’s right about that. I bet the house finches will move in while we’re away.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wind and tide have erased the anguish of that awful day: June 6, 1944. Today, Omaha Beach is a serene space, albeit holy and haunted, too. At low tide, it is unimaginably wide; the thought of traversing it under withering fire is almost too much to comprehend. The sights and sounds and smell of battle are gone now, but the images of D-Day and its heroes remained fixed in our mind’s eye. We have to look away.

Five years ago, I walked on Omaha Beach and found a tiny shell—an auger—on the tide line. It was the only shell I saw one the beach that day. Its fragile delicacy seemed a promise fulfilled: that somehow, we survive and the world heals and carries on. I brought the shell home with me and a jeweler friend of mine was able to fix it to a gold chain; a simple, elegant necklace. I gave it to my wife as a Christmas gift. She wears it carefully and likes to tell its singular story.

It may be true that time heals all wounds, but I think that’s a lot to ask of time. I doubt that those who survived D-Day ever forgot the things they saw on the beaches of Normandy that bloody day. I’m sure the same is true for the parents, family members, and friends who have lost loved ones to the recent spate of gun violence that continues to plague this country. Some wounds just never heal and no delicate little necklace will ever ease their pain. 

Abraham Lincoln knew this truth all too well. The Gettysburg Address is only 271 words long, but it still resonates today, clear as a bell. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 

President Lincoln could have said the same about the soldiers who died on D-Day or, for that matter, of the innocent children and teachers killed in schools across the country, or of the shoppers gunned down in a Buffalo supermarket. There is so much unfinished work still to do and it defies all logic that so many of our elected officials refuse to do it. We truly risk perishing from the earth.

I think of the natural beauty of that little auger shell I found on Omaha Beach. It seemed so lonely and out-of-place that windy day, yet there it was, what Anne Morrow Lindbergh might have called “a gift from the sea.” I wish there were some beauty to be found in the wake of more recent events, but I can’t see it. Yet. Maybe someday, there will be new and better laws and regulations to save us from ourselves, to advance all the unfinished work that still needs to be done.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon.