October 3

For nearly Half of my life I have lived near a river that called me to its banks.  First was the Charles River, when I lived in Waltham Massachusetts.  I rode my bicycle there with a friend, who has since died.  We entered through the Mount Feake Cemetery and walked among the old graves...

In the 'Seminary' as we called it, by the Charles River, we pondered mortality, among other things.  She was just thirty when she died, we knew from our subtraction.  The epitaph is unclear.Shakespeare, I wondered, led down a garden path  by Hathaway.

Near the entry by the railroad bridge there is a monstrous copper beech all carved with messages, a sign prohibiting:

Bicycles, roller skates,

picnics, plastic flowers

between April

and October.

We wouldn't have been caught dead on roller skates, or bringing plastic flowers, but we did bring sandwiches and. sometimes, bicycles.

The graves begin with some small markers:  For the military dead:

Here Cpl Dennis Ryan received

a musket ball in his leg and died

in 1887.

The Civil War it must have been. We never knew why they're buried here. They weren't local boys.

And, up the hill, the Yankee fathers: Isaac Watts, the Robert's family:  Mother, Father,

a child dead at fourteen months; another, eighteen years...They had a paper mill,

The Roberts family, where Brandeis is today, are gathered within a spiky iron fence to keep

the rabble out.

Here, Nathanial Weeder,

Fngineer, and .

Wife Rebecca

We Will Meet in Heaven..

Sometimes we climbed the grassy slope to where the railroad passes, a Swedish neighborhood.

Swedes came early to work in the watch factory.  Then higher up are the French, the Irish;  Here the earth is raw. Like the New Rich, the New Dead disturb the neighborhood. These stones are crisply chisled, shiny.

we liked the old ones, softened by the rain. .

But usually, to avoid the homeless sitting by the tracks, we walked below, along the river; and you

looked under milkweed leaves for Monarch pupae. Redwings flitted and the reflection of the old watch factory wavered in the water.

And we walked out to where the little spit of land protrudes into the river, where we'd lay our bikes down,

sit with our forbidden sandwiches. The stone is rough pink marble, with a plaque attached:

Anne Hathaway Abbott

She was above all things

Glad and Young.

It’s at the end of the little point; the river reeds are just beyond.

But it was actually ee cummings, I found out many years later, just as I was about to forget you,

another friend quoted it at the top of an infrequent letter.  That’s, however, another story.

I cut your bangs here once. Life was so heavy for you then.You missed an appointment at the beauty parlor;

and some occasion called for grooming. Your hair was thick and lovely; you were lovely, though you wouldn't believe; yours was a body that refused to hasten after mind; it tipped a weight that year, though previously you had been glad and young..

I think you wanted then to die, though still you rode your bike and clung to most of all the victories

that you'd won the year that you decided Jesus was your friend.

You couldn't work, but painted in bright colors at the day center where you curled back into childhood, and you still cooked for us sometimes in that apartment that increasingly reflected mind's disarray.  Your parents came a couple times a year to straighten up, as if that ordering could work on brain cells.

A problem in the temporal lobe. The disorder shook you with violence a day you helped in kindergarten,

frightened you that you might harm the inconceivable…a child.

But we still had our jokes and ate our sandwiches.by my river. You always call it, your river,

you objected. It's mine because I love it, I’d reply. If it were mine, I'd keep it cleaner, you said.

Well, I'm working on it, I said. A great responsibility to own a river, I. And we, all of us who loved it,

were pulling mossy supermarket carts out of its murk, until one day that it was cleaner and I waded into

its tea colored water, swam a stroke.

You, who earlier would have followed, were afraid.

But you liked my flights;

and so I came to own conglomerates of places that we loved, and means of getting there: the Red Line and the Blue: a futuristic bullet streaking through its tiled corridors to

WONDERLAND

But my chief possession was the river and the "Seminary." And I wonder, sometimes, did we really ponder, there, mortality?

Not, in my case,

.

Your mother wrote four months ago to say you'd lost your battle as you waited for another surgery.

You were just fifty, but I think the battle was half hearted.  You were tired from that struggle

with your body which began the day you first stood up to toddle, or even earlier.

And I am old and trying to be glad—It is a duty I have set myself.  But I ponder now, when I remember sitting by that uncut gravestone lifting up your heavy hair to cut, mortality.