With Love To My Father

From book in progress:
LOVE. SING. DANCE & SAVE THE PLANET:
Role Models for Reinventing Our Later Lives



My father taught me to look to the stars: The Big and Little Dippers, and Orion the Hunter whose belt shone three stars in a row. He also taught me to love laughter — as well as Virginia Woolf, haiku, butterflies, Broadway, old movies and the streets of New York. He taught me to work every day work at something I believe in. To eat what is put in front of me. To say “thank you, “I'm sorry” and mean it. To be on time and never go to bed angry. To walk the beach in summer and winter. To save bees and bats and anything that lives.He taught me to keep going when he no longer could.

In 1984, my father was 71 when my mother died suddenly in her sleep. He said her death felt “like a black hole in space.” My parents married in college with no money or career prospects, and 50 years later, he’d done well in advertising and later teaching at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Graduate Business. My mother backed his ambitions, making nests and guiding his decisions with good nature and bold, clear-eyed counsel. After all their years together, my parents were still entertaining and planning trips even as he booked the Ritz and she the Ramada. They were still best friends.

Her death left my father alone in the house they'd planned together. At first he said, “it's your mother's house. I don't feel I should move a thing.” But slowly - blessed with good health and the affection of family, friends and even lovers - he found new ways to move forward. He adapted to his losses, and although had no apparent master plan for aging his innate instincts would serve him well. My father continued to practice survival tactics that rewarded him with peaceful and productive later years. His was a strategy worth my following.

He left complaints at home and brought humor to the table.

He vowed not to worry about anything longer than three days.

Every morning, he dressed in his best and packed his briefcase, off to teach and write at the Darden School. When he reached the age of mandatory retirement, he found ways to continue doing what he enjoyed, even if not to full capacity. He wrote for the School’s alumni magazine and sent out manuscripts for adventure novels first drafted in long hand. The year after my mother died, my father wrote and published “The Dragonfly,” a novella about her childhood. Writing was his first and last defense.

He drew fanciful cartoons for all our holidays and birthdays.

He volunteered his talents to the Dyslexia Center and Recording for the Blind.

He reread Ian Fleming, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Virginia Woolf.

He made his first travel plans alone, joining a group for England. He made new friends on the journey and returned many subsequent springs to see them. One year, he took his granddaughter with him. Another summer, he and his grandson flew to Maui where they bought flowered shirts and marveled at volcanoes and waterfalls.

He also fostered new friendships with the young. When their babies were born, he wrote them welcoming letters, many of which were framed or saved as keepsakes.

He swam, walked and chinned himself on the bathroom door. He stood straight and tall and stayed “on the wagon” for more than 40 years.

In his late 80s, my father had several close car wrecks but, when approached, graciously agreed to stop driving. It was a tough loss of mobility and freedom
but he refused to be cloistered at home. He had his housekeeper drive him to
the grocery store and to the Darden library. Here, my father worked on new stories, visited with faculty andread The New York Times. When friends asked his whereabouts, he replied without hesitation, “At work!”

On Sundays, he took a taxi to the early service and sang off-key at St. Paul's Episcopal church.

At home, he let the paint peel and the roof leak.

He said, “take it” to anything anyone admired. And when he said “I love you,” they were words easy to return.
He often volunteered, “I'm a happy man.”

While my father fought retirement and remained relatively strong, I eventually became concerned for him living alone, however much he insisted on his independence. I was relieved when he accepted my prodding to have a University student rent a back room.

I worried that he ate less and slept more; he dismissed cataracts and late-developing diabetes. By 88, I saw signs of mini strokes and forgetfulness and an increased effort to mask changes with genial reassurances and an unusually fertile vocabulary.

I remember that late January afternoon. My father walked me to my car in the cold. I smoothed down his blowing hair and red sheltland sweater. We hugged and said goodbye.

The next morning, the housekeeper phoned in panic. My father had collapsed at the dining room table while a friend helped him pay bills. I raced to my father as medics strapped him to a gurney, sped to the hospital and into intensive care. Twenty-four hours later, he was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, a rare and aggressive attack to the brain. For a month, he hovered near consciousness. I came to see him every day, and every day I feared would be his last.

Incredibly, he fought his way back to leave the hospital, only to spend months at a nursing home before returning home to around-the-clock care. His doctor, a Hospice specialist who would generously guide me in his care, said, “Your father is amazing. Most men half his age would not have lived.”

I learned that my father's will to live was indeed amazing. I saw a man much reduced, sometimes bewildered but by nature still gallant, dignified and wanting to amuse. He described his day to a friend visiting him in the nursing home: “I get out of bed and put my feet on the floor. Then I take my pulse. If I have one, I shave. If not, why bother.”

Soon after coming home from the nursing home, he asked his housekeeper to drive him back to the Darden library; he hoped to work there one last afternoon. Work was still the staff by which he stood.

When confined to home and I or my husband arrived, he'd rise out of bed, tie on his silk bathrobe and ask the news. I told him that I was working on a documentary about a 107-year-old local lady. He smiled and asked, "Does she date?"

Other times he struggled with confusion. He reported seeing white tigers loose in the yard. He said he'd piloted the "Enola Gay" with the atom bomb aboard and begged me to apologize to the women and children of Japan.

Even in confusion, my father seemed to draw on courage that put pleasure before pain. He enjoyed the summer's heat, sitting beside the ‘50s pool, eating fresh tomato sandwiches lathered in mayonnaise. In the fall, we drove the country back roads as he complimented the trees for their rich colors. We listened to tapes of Bing Crosby, Strauss, Mozart and Garrison Keillor; I read him favorite haiku and poems he'd written years ago but no longer knew.

Sometimes my father said he felt like he was 100. Christmas night he sank into a deep sleep that lingered over a week. He lived until January 5th, 2000, seeming to have willed himself into the new century and three days past his 90th birthday. I was thankful for his many years, but when they ended, even 90 felt too few.

Also online @ : http://hospitaldrive.med.virginia.edu/

House Cleaning

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From book in progress:
LOVE. SING. DANCE & SAVE THE PLANET:
Role Models for Reinventing Our Later Lives



In the first days after my father died, I didn’t know where to go. I looked for comfort in what hadn’t changed; bedrock. I’d been at my father’s side during the past year when he was sped to the hospital struck unconscious by viral encephalitis, later during his months in a nursing home, and finally at home with around the clock care.

On schedule, I drive back to my father's house each morning. The front door, rarely locked, is bolted and a light left on at night. I turn the brass skeleton key; I welcome the click in the lock. I hear my footsteps as I wander from room to room. I find toast crumbs on the dining room table, brushes and combs with fine gray hairs. I half expect to see my father sleeping in his four poster bed and his doctor and nurses ready to report his wakeful hours of the night before.

Soon enough, I know I will have to clean out my father's house and sell it. For now, it's a sanctuary, a sort of “no trespassing” zone, an illusion of permanence I want to hold onto. Like my father after my mother's death, I now feel nothing should be moved. I too feel disrespectful in assuming possession. After all my father lived here for almost fifty years. He and my mother carefully saved for its construction so when they moved back to Virginia - with the future uncertain - their home would be secure. They started their married life on a dream and a dime and their house represented success, especially to my father.

My mother decorated the house handsomely with family antiques and flea market finds. She was gearing up for its overdue redecorating the year she died - 18 years earlier. The wallpaper had faded, the rugs were worn, and paint had chipped in the kitchen and bathrooms. My father, however, was more than content to leave it alone. He frequently said, “I love this house. Isn't this is a beautiful house?”

His highest hope was that some day I would live there too. I felt guilty not granting his wish, but my husband and I felt well rooted in our own clapboard house just three miles away.

In these first months, I slowly sort through my father’s belongings, his correspondence and unfinished manuscripts. I cherish the quiet, untouched memories. I want time to let go and don't advertise his house for sale.

Soon, however, there are knocks on the door, realtors asking to show the house to clients. I enjoy giving the tour, slow to compute that “showing” actually means selling. I hesitate when a couple with three young children offer me what seems a substantial sum. It also seems foolish to turn it down.

I agree with mixed emotions. Handed a contract with a closing date of early September, I don't yet understand the deadline I've assigned myself. I start with the small stuff. Out go the tattered linens; the broken pots and pans.

One by one, I give my father's favorite books to my favorite people. Others are carted off by book dealers or donated to the University of Virginia library, somehow giving the illusion that the bookshelves are still half full.

By July I merely make a dent. Each object and piece of furniture - even those I hadn't particularly noticed - now feel fraught with family stories, my parents' souvenirs entrusted to me for only the most appreciative hands.

Tag sale champagne bottles turned into lamps; mother's prized collection of miniature chests. Haitian primitives carried home on holiday. My father's fanciful paintings of birds and beasts; toy wooden boats he substituted for sailing his own; his Navy cap and uniform; my wedding dress.

Even worse, is the paper trail. I discover that I am descended from people who'd never threw a scrap of it away. In the debris, I uncover family history, piece by moldy piece: interviews my journalist grandfather wrote on the road; Christmas cards sent to my grandmother from generations of “her boys” at the University of Virginia; boxes of my parents' letters written daily during World War II when my father was stationed in Hawaii and my mother and I waited word at home.

Throughout the spring and into summer, I host an ongoing garage sale but sell selectively, happy to visit familiar items in their new homes. Balloon prints now bank a friend's fireplace; a child's Mexican chair has traveled down the street to a young couple's first home. One afternoon, three friends bring me a picnic expecting to find the house cleared out. When they see little progress, they whisper about my sanity. “You have to do something NOW!” says Kathleen.

No more time to reminisce. August soon to melt into September and I've already extended the house closing two weeks. I hit the Yellow Pages. Antique dealers suddenly appear to whom I sell a corner cupboard and grandfather's clock. Auction dealers back their truck into the yard and leave with a full load - LIFE magazines of the 30s and 40s; feathered hats and musty fox furs, my father's Navy uniform.

Next I trade up - substituting my parents' better bureaus, beds and tables for ours. Movers deliver my father's dining room table and chairs to my daughter and her husband; the rest is packed and hauled to storage. A friend lets me dump a dozen boxes of family Bibles and papers in her attic.

When the house finally looks empty except for discards, I call a junk dealer. On a hot late summer evening - assisted by a crew of twelve women - he packs his moving van to the top and steams into the night, leaving behind only echoes and dust.

Before the new owners are due to arrive, I walk through my father's house for the last time. I stop to take a few last photographs, one on the patio through the living room's French doors. The picture somehow turns into a double exposure - my reflection shadowed in the living room's floor to ceiling mirror. That afternoon, I drive slowly out of my father's driveway, and although invited, will wait to return.

Albert Maysles

"...now I'm making more personal films...Sooner or later, any serious
artist gets closer to his cravings and elements of childhood..."



From book in progress:
LOVE. SING. DANCE & SAVE THE PLANET:
Role Models for Reinventing Our Later Lives



When I first met Al Maysles, he made me want to be a filmmaker too. It was 1970 at the University of Virginia after Al’s screening of "Salesman," the story of four Boston Bible salesmen whom he and his brother, David, trailed door to door. Their documentary cameras steadily revealed the salesmens’ unscripted stories and disillusionment with their trade.

I felt an immediate pull to the Maysles’ film and Al’s easy intensity. I followed the Maysles brothers’ career and made Al my surrogate mentor. We met again in 1976 on release of "Grey Gardens" - his and David’s keyhole look at Jackie Onassis' eccentric mother-daughter aunt and cousin sequestered at home in East Hampton.

I joined a gathering in the Dakota where Al and his wife, Gillian, a family therapist, lived with their son and three daughters. Winding down a spiral staircase, I stepped into Al's study and a circle of young filmmakers, all jealous for his attention.

I soon took film-making courses and ventured into short documentary projects. I shot hours with my father - talking together, his last birthdays and Sundays by the pool. Some day I plan to make a film about my father but am still reluctant to look at the footage.

I continued tracking the Maysles brothers’ teamwork in “direct cinema,” David often on sound and Al on camera, admiring their results: “The Beatles in the USA,” “Gimme Shelter,” Christo’s “Valley Curtain,” “Running Fences,” “Islands” and “Umbrellas.”

In 1987, after Al and David made cinema verite history and shot more than fifteen films together, David Maysles died of a stroke. I couldn’t imagine one set of eyes without the other.

How has Al continued to create without the close collaboration of his brother? How has he found his own vision and where has it led? Al agrees to an interview, suggesting that I come early to watch two recent films made with Susan Froemke, his main collaborator since David’s death.

West of Broadway, the elevator rises to Maysles’ rooftop offices where I’m ushered into the screening room. I think of my father while watching “Letting Go: A Hospice Journey,” the record of three terminally ill patients’ peaceful farewells at home. In “Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton,” a Mississippi family persists through poverty and wins Maysles Films a 2001 Academy Award nomination. Al’s camera remains attentive and unflinching.

I wait expectant and elated, to meet my teacher again, not sure in spite of Al's geniality, that he remembers me. I follow Al to a back room away from young staffers manning the phones.

Approaching 80, Al is still intense, taut and wiry; his hair now tousled and white. We sit side by side on a sofa wedged between shelves of film canisters and equipment. Traffic rattles far below. I hold the tape recorder up close: What is his new work and how has he recovered from David’s death?

"I've been dillydallying, but now I'm making more personal films,” says Al. “David's death (at 53) was unexpected. A terrible loss. It’s not the same without him..Never the same.” He adds quickly that even without David, his standards remain the same. “My philosophy hasn’t changed. I’m applying the same methods with Susan (Froemke).” Perhaps the very fact that Al continues to practice the philosophy and methods he and David mastered together, assures his brother’s remaining presence.

“Now I'm also looking at my own Jewish identity. Sooner or later any serious artist gets closer to his cravings and elements of childhood." Al catches my eye; he listens. It's hard to resist his gaze.

Al says, while not directly linked to David’s death, he’s confronting his Jewish heritage, however circuitously, in shooting his current film, “The Jew on Trial." The film tells the story of Mendel Beilis, a 1913 Kiev factory foreman falsely accused of murdering a 13 year old Christian boy.

"It's very much linked with persecution, being on trial, what a Jew feels from being Jewish. Now I'm finally exploring the idea of the outsider as a Jew. David and I identified with the outsider. We identified with Edie and her mother (in "Grey Gardens"). Outsiders. The (Bible) salesman was also an outsider. In a sense, the housewives he meets are outsiders too, outside of the more fulfilling life, just stuck in the house."

A psychology teacher before becoming a filmmaker, Al confides that he's identified with outsiders since fighting on the Boston streets with Irish kids quick to label Jews "Christ killers." “‘Salesman,’” he says, “was personal for me and David growing up Jewish in Boston. It brought me and my brother closer together with the Irish.”

Born on November 26, 1926 the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Al says he also witnessed his school teacher mother risk her job fighting the stigma of being Jewish. "My mother was always very active in civil rights, rights for women, blacks. Later, when she was dying of cancer, she turned to us and said at the last moment, ‘I know what I want on my gravestone: 'count on me as one who loved my fellow man.'

"I'm sure one of the things I found so interesting in making ‘Salesman,' was that Paul - like my father - was a poetic kind of guy but in the wrong job. He could have done better than being a postal clerk.” His father's polished cornet from World War I hangs on Al's kitchen wall. He says he never heard his father play it, but enjoys thinking of his father while washing dishes, a chore his father also performed.

“Both my parents were very optimistic, true believers in life," says Al. “I too believe there is good in everybody. I'm looking for it and don't want to let it go by unnoticed.

“I’m also filming people I see by chance, ‘fellow passengers, poetic moments,’ encounters and stories as they take place on and off trains worldwide,” he says. “I call it ‘In Transit.’ ”The train is a metaphor for life.” Al replays scenes of reunion: a mother and daughter reuniting in the Philadelphia station after 22 years of separation; a couple traveling home to the Ukraine with two young boys they're raising after her sister was murdered by her husband. Al discovers their story traveling in Russia, his own ancestral turf.

Al’s son, Philip, (named for his grandfather), once wrote in a school essay that his father’s worn baby shoes held generations of Jewish history. Al has now teamed with his son, a visual artist and filmmaker, teaching documentary filmmaking to youths in East Harlem whose parents are in prison. As a member of Philip's "On Our Side’s” team, perhaps Al is reminded of working with his brother as he becomes his son's mentor, ally and one of the crew.

And Al comes ever closer to telling his own story. “Not long ago," Al says, “PBS asked me to be the subject of a documentary. I was interested until they suggested a filmmaker for the job. I said, 'if anybody in the world is going to make it, I should. Let's do it as an autobiography.' They refused.” So Al now sifts through personal footage and outtakes - old and new - for his own documentary, “Handheld and From the Heart.”

“The best films are literally personal or personal in an underlying fashion.
Filming documentaries," says Al, patient and persuasive, "is a chance to discover as it happens and make it fruitful. You're dealing with random events, the uncontrollable. The moment you begin to control things, you're defying reality. It's very important to let things be, to keep an open mind to discover what it’s all about. Risk - it's everything.”

I’m listening. He keeps teaching. "I try to get an engagement going between the viewer and what's on the screen. An engagement that hopefully transfers the experience of the other person into a lasting memory.”

Al almost whispers. "I feel there is no greater communicator than one real person to another. You have to get close; use your eyes and empathy to get into the heart and soul of the matter. Making a film is a way of looking at the world, an act of love."

Maybe it's finally time to unpack the footage of my father; time to turn our hours together into a film, showing how he once was and how I most want to remember him.

A Place and Time

From VIRGINIA LIVING

However weathered and tilted the axis, we rely on our memories of summer places to remain as fixed as the North Star, a sure compass to the past.

My memories of Virginia Beach stretch back to the 1940s when my parents bought a new shingled house, panelled and furnished in matching pine, a block from the dunes and the wide, white beach. A screened porch and windows opened to hot breezes that smelled of bayberry, honeysuckle and gardenias. Yuccas stood at attention by the clothesline and blackberries provided endless picking for pies I wasn’t yet old enough to bake.

Before I could remember, photos show me running free, bare as a butterfly in the sea grasses, my mother’s sunglasses falling from my nose; we hugged under a striped umbrella; my father waded into the waves with me high on his shoulders.

My father commuted to the beach from New York where he worked in advertising. We lived in a brownstone on17th Street, the Stuyvesant Park sandbox my first touch of the seashore. Later, we moved near the gated gardens of Gramercy Park. My parents were both Virginians, however, still rooted to the state of their births.

At THE Beach - as only Virginians label their home terrrain - my parents made life-long friends with neighbors they looked forward to seeing each summer. The Morrels from Baltimore, the Baldwins from Lynchburg, the Jeters from Roanoke. They gathered in the mid-day sun, cigarettes lit, to watch their children and darken their tans. Before the sun set, they met for cocktails and stories of the day. The Morrels’ handsome older son went to the Gilman School. Just looking at him made me speechless. One day, I was invited to his house for lunch; in excitement, I choked, sputtered and spouted a gulp of milk from my nose. I ran home in morbid disgrace.

The Jeters lived next door and had no children. Fielding Jeter, a quiet man with the face of a choir boy, grew petunias and made fresh peach ice cream so rich it clung to your tongue. He carefully weeded rows of lettuce while hummingbirds hovered in the pink mimosa trees. The sprinkler spritzed the grass, teasing me to sleep on the porch swing.

The Worthingtons lived up the street, close to the steep dunes. They were a sprawling family who gathered under one roof each summer. Their long-legged daughter was rightly named Sugar and the sturdy father and son both named Ben. I looked forward to seeing Lucy, the family maid, more often than not in grey uniform and white aporn washed laundry in the open garage. She was light-skinned and lean like a stalk of bamboo bending easily in the wind. She knotted her dark hair at her neck. She smiled and waved me into the shaded garage, a welcome mat from the street’s hot stones. I didn’t wear shoes to show I had tough feet.

Lucy let me peer into the three-legged barrel where dirty clothes churned in sudsy water. Then she squeezed the soggy shirts and linens through a wringer, twisting out any extra moisture. Sometimes she let me crank the handle. She stacked the tin tubs with wet laundry, ready to hang on the line like tiny masts.

Other happy hours were spent reading "Mopsy" and "Wonder Woman" comics and Nancy Drew mysteries which caused my usually cheerful grandmother to cluck in protest. She made up for it, teaching me to play Canasta and handing out nickles and dimes at the first ring of the Good Humor truck’s afternoon bell. We all ate fresh corn on the cob, blue fish and spot; we cooled off with sunset rides on the boardwalk’s merry-go-round and ferris wheel.

Storm clouds only gathered at Virginia Beach as the tides came in from World War II. Military manuevers heightened at Army bases on both ends of Atlantic Avenue. Convoys of camouflaged trucks carried solidiers from post to post. I waved to the troops from behind our white-washed fence. Landing barges spilled ashore in practice landings; B17s and 24s flew in Vs overhead. My father, eager to be part of the war, volunteered for the Navy. He was turned down for being under weight and near-sighted. Determined, he worked out, ate carrots and took eye exercises and then the Navy welcomed him aboard.

Once accepted, I sat beside my father at the ocean’s edge, quizzing him with flash cards to identify U.S. and enemy planes. Too soon, he was shipped to far away Hawaii. From this mythical place, he wrote and illustrated tales of wind gods, rare white deer, ducks who fall in love on the Central Park lake.

He also sent me a grass skirt and goldfish that I believed had miraculously swum across the Pacific. In fact, my mother found and purchased the fish at the local 5&10. Years later, I realized that she performed other magic throughout the war, keeping the beach house full of friends and laughter, while writing to my father every morning hoping the return mail would only bring good news.

Her wishing worked and my father returned home with war stories of a last minute assignment that kept him off a cruiser that was later bombed and intelligence assignments that based him squarely in the Officers’ Club swimming pool. My father joked that he’d only been given 10 minutes to recount his "harrowing" war experiences. Instead, they were buried like ghostly sandcrabs, making sure that only sunshine beamed brightly on our beach idylls for many years to come.

Family summers at the beach continued until I was in high school. Soon after a houseparty on my 15th birthday, my mother’s doctor said her skin was ripe for cancer if she continued to bake in the sun, something we were all too eager to do. She reasoned that if the sun was ruled out, so was our reason for coming to the beach. The next summer, the house was sold.

Still, I never stopped coming to the beach. John and I decided to get married in the moonlight over the breaking waves. Every summer, we rented apartments or cottages and carted our children to the beach, even before they could walk. They chased the sandpipers and squealed at the whitecaps, and, later in high school, they stayed out late, no doubt, also watching the stars dip into the sea.

We now make the yearly trek without parents or children. We stay at a hotel and request an oceanfront view. I still anticipate that moment of reunion, that baptism of the steadfast sky and sea.

This year, we stayed in a cottage two blocks North of my family’s old house. Every day, I walked South on the beach, tempted to stop on our street. The last afternoon, I tiptoed past workmen building a walkway onto the beach.

At our house, facing the busy avenue, the legustrum hedge was now too high to see in, the blackberry field covered in cement. The Baldwins’ had been upscaled with wrought iron pillars; the Jeters’ was crowded with cars and toddler trucks.

A black man was cutting the bushes at the house one back from the beach. “Do the Worthingtons live here?” I asked. He pointed. “No. Next door. Ring the bell.”

I hesitated and circled the driveway. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s ok.”

Following his urging, I rang the bell. A man I didn’t recognize opened the door, someone athletic and strong, with a ruddy face deeply lined from summers in the sun. He wore kakhi shorts and a pale green safari shirt. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Are you Ben Worthington?” I wondered if I clearly remembered Ben the father and Ben the son, two men whose military bearings remained formidable in my memory.

“Yes, I’m Ben Worthington,” he said politely.

“My family used to live in the house on the corner,” I said. “I’m Elizabeth Howard. I was Betty Meade.”

He extended his hand, a smile slowly forming. “Ev Meade’s daughter?” I nodded.

“A great guy. Funny man. Great guy. Please come in; have a seat.”

“No thanks. I just had a peek at our old house and wanted see if anybody I knew still lived on the street. I remember your sister, Sugar. And Lucy. She was so nice to me.”

He stared over his wire glasses, looking perhaps for a girl of 13 or 14 whom he might have known as a young man in his 20s. “Funny, that you should stop by today,” he said. “I was just working on Lucy’s estate for her children and grandchildren. She died last year. She was 85. She worked for my mother for 52 years.” I was glad the garage was closed where Lucy once strung the laundry.

With our backs to the beach, we stood on the steps, Ben suddenly eager to tell me about his family: his older sister now lived next door; Sugar and her boys owned a place on Maryland's Bay; his parents had died and left him the land where his house now stood surrounded by clusters of rhodendrons, hostas, azaleas and camellias.

Ben said he'd attended Virginia Military Institute, and had seen my father one summer in a business program at the University of Virginia. He said he remembered him well and was sorry he’d died. He was retired, and two years ago, had had a stroke. He said he couldn’t drive anymore and sometimes got things mixed up.

Ben said he still loved the beach; it was too bad my parents sold their house. “Won’t you please come in?”

“Thanks but my husband’s waiting on the beach. He’ll wonder where where I am. Maybe another time.”

Ben showed me to the beach path now umbrelled with bent holly trees. “Remember how high the dunes used to be here? They got pretty well flattened in ‘62.”

I started up the path, remembering the dunes and my parents sheltering there in partial shade before walking the rest of the way home.

“Please come back,” Ben called.

“I will. Thanks so much.” I waved, grateful to this stranger watching me leave, still uncertain who I was and why I’d come but willing to believe and bear witness that I had been there too in a place and time that we’d surely never forget.

VIRGINIA LIVING, Summer 2003