A Still Life…A Life Still

For as long as I remember, I’ve recognized the low rumble of my father’s dictation chuffing behind his study door.  The muffled cadence, thoughtful pause:  then a rewind, new punctuation, beginning again.  Rivers of brown plastic ferried his words between home and office loaded with correspondence, instructions, inspirations.  Now, as his writing hand slackens, as his travel options dwindle, a tiny filament of tape still connects him to the world.

Yesterday I called; he was despondent.  The full cassette of dictation, just completed, replayed only static.  He had lost a whole day of words – words he fought to form with his recalcitrant tongue – gone into air.  His voice was too weak to begin again.  He will start all over tomorrow.  Words are meant to travel, go out of us, and land in the soft glove of another; caught, returned.  This human desire to connect is unremitting.

I called to tell him that my niece, his only granddaughter, was visiting at my house with her beloved.  That he had gone down on his knees that afternoon and wagered words that risk a lifetime of love, and the words had fallen into the soft glove of her heart.  Received.  Returned.  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

And for that wide, sunlit moment, my father left the futility of his day and came over into this joy.  Will you?  I will.  He came to rest in the boldness of words that went out of one self and came home in another, that spanned generations backward and forward beyond his scope to see, that met in truth and lit all of those who love them with hope.  And in that spacious hope, he lingered; carried on a long river of yes.

Susan

~ by Stephanie on 03/27/2010.

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