Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons
Photo by Emily Elliott
Divine Intervention
I.
As open to the world when she left as when here. Drove off in the opposite
direction trying not to allow her departure to infect me with usual
melancholy, what with her simply flying to Florida on business for an
extended weekend. Sun not at all high that early in the morning. What they
deem “miller’s bread” at Standard Bakery still warm, the woman warning to
keep paper bag open. Endeavor cast traps on the inner harbor, almost
guiltily, it seemed, the guys in all-weather gear staring back hard into my
binoculars. Caught hooded merganser pair, then two more pair with added
female further out. City’s forestry unit out here the day before cleared
bamboo & brush seaward, taking down whole rows of understory trees cliff
side, offering better views of granite, quartz schist, & other geology I care
less about defining than taking in their forms, excavating light & shadow.
This cliff has a lot to say about the length of Time earth’s been here, animal
& man. Heard the lone male loon before seeing him. The whole scene did its
best to fill the openness of my being, my tactile sense.
II.
Back at home things attempted to intervene of my behalf, intercede for
absence. Coffee remained on offering renewal. Kitchen & living room walls,
where February sun now high enough penetrating bay windows, let go
parting words heard before & held onto earlier in the dark. Consoling
postcards from various friends strewn around randomly. Granddaughter
smiling away from refrigerator door top to bottom into the future, while
contemplative visage of the fifteenth-century Chinese guardian head seemed
to keep secure the years past. At noon, first glass of wine masked a
personality all its own: Italian Primitivo is Zinfandel. Bread from Standard all
one needs. All well & good in the first hours, but Time has a way of slowing
to a crawl without her. Both nights cast a brutal pall the white wool blanket
from Chiapas could barely keep at bay. Her few phone calls merely
accentuated distance away. It wasn’t until the morning of her scheduled
return, while writing this, that Bach came on Venice radio with the chorale,
Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, “Wake up, the voice calls us,” I felt we were
both home free.
Thumbnail Sketch: “Buzzy”
At Harbor Fish spoke first to John, then Buzzy, who’d already told me before
that great story of the tuna they caught in the fifties, what with no local
market for it then, tried to trade with another boat just for bait, but they
wouldn’t take it, & the captain said, “Throw that damned thing overboard!”
which they did, the weight of it busting the boat’s propeller, so they had to
get towed into port. Today, he begins talking about the weather, best winter
yet, then tells me his Grandfather, Bertram Lester Dow, used to take him on
board fishing, when he was five-years-old in the forties, (he’s now sixty-
eight), but that he, Lester Bertram “Buzzy” Dow was first in the family to
own his own boat, Lady Esther, named after his mother, & when at thirty-
nine after an eighteen-hour operation he could not remember the doctor’s
name, because the aneurism affected his frontal lobe, site of recent memory.
“What’s my name?” Doctor Wilson would ask him every day. He couldn’t
answer. Then someone gave him a Wilson Sporting Goods shirt, & when the
doctor asked, his wife would point there, he’d answer. You’d never guess
Buzzy, the only name he responded to at the hospital, not Lester, ever went
through all this. As I headed over to the cutting table before young Conor
could slice up tail ends of both tuna into “petite steaks,” agree to weigh them
up whole, mark one “sushi,” the other “good grade,” charging both the same
low half-price, Buzzy was remarking that warm weather the past few years
brought schools of herring just outside Peaks Island, where you could see
from shore whales after them.
FURTHER STUDY:
Standard Baking Co.
Hooded Merganser
Harbor Fish Market
