Final Visit with a Neighbor

Sydney Lea reflects on the last words he heard from friend.

“My much-missed neighbor on his 95th birthday.”

Sydney Lea, Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 through 2015, has published several essays in Oldster Magazine.

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On the last visit I paid him, our good old neighbor didn’t greet me. He simply said, I was down by the river. Then he stopped talking for so long in his overstuffed armchair that I checked to see if the river memory had soothed him to sleep. But in time he went on. I kept tellin’ myself, “It’s all right.”

So the recollection seemed to have been uneasy, not serene. What about the river brought on his anxiety? Of course, I couldn’t be sure anxiety was what he recalled. He probably wasn’t sure himself.

A sad if commonplace situation: an aged but sharp-witted man falls, breaks a hip, and his mind starts instantly to erode. Since he’d tripped and gone down in the kitchen the winter before, my friend’s past was sunk so deeply that when memories did crop up, they were always mere fragments of stories, true and otherwise. I had no way to distinguish. He was always a great one for tall tales, after all.

I done something after school! he blurted next. I stayed quiet, expectant, and didn’t know why. He blinked and drooled. That made me wince. I started in by stealin’ a kiss; it was Addie Benson, which lived by the railroad tracks there, he continued. I didn’t know the woman he meant, no doubt long gone. This must be important, I figured, uneasy myself now, but he left things at that cryptic kiss.

Some hated them Frenchmen, all right, he mused. I never did. Didn’t matter to me different ones of ‘em said they was québecois which hated us back.

A pause: then, I cut myself once; you never saw such blood! But I was the one done the cuttin’. Weren’t no one else. Don’t believe the foolishness they tell you.

A sad if commonplace situation: an aged but sharp-witted man falls, breaks a hip, and his mind starts instantly to erode. Since he’d tripped and gone down in the kitchen the winter before, my friend’s past was sunk so deeply that when memories did crop up, they were always mere fragments of stories, true and otherwise. I had no way to distinguish. He was always a great one for tall tales, after all.

Though his thoughts were a mishmash that final year, for him each likely marked a flashback to some important moment in his life. I recall that he turned glumly coherent for a moment, declaring, I ain’t worth a dipper full of piss no more. Can’t keep a goldarned thing straight. Then he breathed some words I could just make out: Hope this is it.

I wanted to coax him out of that notion, and yet I sat there stymied, hating myself in a way. I didn’t like his this or his it, but what could I say to dissuade him? He was 97, for the love of God!

It’s like somebody tied my arm behind my back. I cringed, but not at the platitude. You ever get this balled up?

I had. I am.

“The couple who were our closest neighbors. They were married 76 years!”

Just when did I learn how uncertain life was myself? Early, as with so much else a person learns. In seventh grade, my classmate John Wrentham claimed I could never hurt him. The pipsqueak somehow sensed I’d hold back, even though he knew I’d knock him flat if I chose. In eighth, I could tell that Martha Swenson had a crush on me, but I couldn’t manage to start a conversation with her. There were scores of these disquieting spells, especially in my teens.

Though his thoughts were a mishmash that final year, for him each likely marked a flashback to some important moment in his life. I recall that he turned glumly coherent for a moment, declaring, I ain’t worth a dipper full of piss no more. Can’t keep a goldarned thing straight. Then he breathed some words I could just make out: Hope this is it.

Was my self-doubt at all like my ancient companion’s? That may be a stretch, but self-doubt it was, and John and Martha and all the others could detect it those decades back. Some snickered. Some scoffed. Uncertainty has lingered with me, no matter.

I can picture the morning sunlight shining through a Venetian blind. I can still see the striations on one wall of the old neighbor’s room. I tried to focus on the motes in his house’s air, which was close as could be, heat rising through the register from the wood furnace downstairs. My friend was so short that his feet barely reached the carpet, though there were a few bigger and younger men in town, newcomers, as we were thirty-odd years back, who’d made the mistake of thinking him too small to be dangerous. I didn’t even consider any of that nonsense. I loved him from day one.

I still see a poster of John Wayne—unlike my neighbor, both draft-dodger and bogus tough guy—on another wall. My guess was that in their primes my bantam friend could have whipped that tall poseur like a red-headed stepchild. I liked the idea.

I was by the river. He said it again.

I find myself somewhere along the Connecticut River in northern New England almost every day, if only in a car. In warm weather, I’m paddling right on it at every possible opportunity. I’m familiar with its birds and animals, whose populations have shrunk considerably in my 60 years in this part of the country, some in New Hampshire, more in Vermont.

Cormorants come to the Connecticut now. A decade ago, they rarely flew this far west from the ocean or east from Lake Champlain. I sometimes see opossums on the banks, ungainly critters belonging well south of here. I dread the invasion of milfoil, showing up in spots on the Connecticut. Japanese knotweed’s thickets are creeping farther and farther inland. They haven’t crowded our own brook yet, but their arrival seems inescapable, like the prickly barberry bushes 10 years ago.

I almost never sneak up anymore on the lovely little bluewing teal that, come each autumn and spring, sojourned on the river in fair numbers. There’s a setback downstream where a dozen of them coasted among the spatterdock blooms one September evening at sunset, a moment lodged in my head forever.

A huge whitetail buck, somehow spooked into the water many years ago, swam so close to my canoe one October that I backstroked to keep from hitting him. His wet, ivory antlers gleamed with sunrise.

I must caution myself against simplistic sentiment like Hemingway’s at his weakest: Long time ago good, now no good. And yet and yet and yet.....So I’ve beheld and felt the Connecticut River’s movement countless times. I’ve tried, as the cliché puts it, to go with the flow. Sometimes that seems possible; more often it doesn’t.

I still envision the two otters that climbed and slithered down a slide, again and again by Bailey’s Eddy one July afternoon. I skulked as quietly as I could in the shadow of a silver maple, though of course, they knew I was there; they just seemed indifferent to my presence.

I’m still a frequent paddler on the Connecticut but wonders like those seem rarer now, though not as rare as the agile sand martins that once swarmed overhead in countless numbers from the high banks when insects hatched. Their holes still pock those banks, but most of the holes are empty now.

I must caution myself against simplistic sentiment like Hemingway’s at his weakest: Long time ago good, now no good. And yet and yet and yet.....

So I’ve beheld and felt the Connecticut’s movement countless times. I’ve tried, as the cliché puts it, to go with the flow. Sometimes that seems possible; more often it doesn’t. And how untethered do I want my thoughts to be anyhow?

At my neighbor’s house, I tried to decode his free-flowing words, especially these, the last I’d ever hear from him. There must be something, he whispered, then repeated himself: There must be something.

This ain’t it, he added.

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