No more will I be putting sealer on the old dock.
We got our new dock. I’ll forever miss the wooden one, but it was rotting. We were, I’m pretty sure, the last holdouts on the lake to ask the dock people to install and take out a heavy 4’ wooden dock every year. If you live in the south, you probably don’t realize you can’t leave docks in the water over the winter. The ice would break them apart. In any case, our dock people have fussed for years about putting in the heavy sections. So, okay, you have to give some things up.
The feel of wood is nothing like the feel of vinyl, but the vinyl is much better than it used to be. And after all, it will last for years without having to have sealer on it every year and boards occasionally replaced. Someday the whole world will be plastic, God help us.
The beginning of the season is difficult if you have a 115+ year old cottage. As Rosa Rosanna Danna said, “It’s always something.” The gas fireplace needs a new thermo-coupler, whatever that is. We need a new toilet. We need more ceiling fans. I’m meeting the tree guy at the lake this evening to decide how many of our old trees are getting dangerous and will need cutting down. And so on.
The new dock. Not ugly.
Maybe this blog is about change. As much as we want our little cottage to be a museum, as many ancient Life Magazines, old dishes, rickety porch furniture, we save, things break, things wear out. The grandchildren will think THIS is the old days. Maybe they will be nostalgic about our vinyl dock. That is, assuming the future will keep on with the same blessed sameness as the past. That’s not at all certain.
Writing is all about memory, natch. Memory is badly flawed. And once those of us—mostly meaning me, it looks like—are gone, no one will remember what it was like when there was no running water, no electricity. I have these flashes of memory, of going to the outhouse with my grandmother carrying the Coleman gas lantern. I remember the swooshing sound of lighting it.
Of course writing is also about the present and even the future, but even so, they’re backgrounded and contrasted by the past. Present and future draw their energy, their meaning, you could say, by the past. If you want to argue that really, there’s nothing but the present, of course you’re right, but the sense of a present is held in place by past and future, right?
There’s a necessary motion to being alive. If the present is frozen in the present, you basically don’t exist. Existence needs the depth of past and future to have any meaning.
I get so much sense of identity from memories of the past, of the original narrow old 2-foot dock on sawhorses. Do I remember it, or is that only photographs? I think I remember. No matter, nothing’s held in place. One vision melds into the next.
I’ve written so much about the dock. Poems, essays. My sister took an old poem called “Dock” and had AI re-write it, making the dock vinyl. It’s a riot. It’s pretty darn good. Written at warp speed.
Someone said AI can never write a poem, a real one, because AI’s not capable of suffering. Exactly. The sense of loss—of the past, of our past, our loved ones—is what defines and enlivens the present. Contrast is how we know we’re alive. To know what you have requires knowing what you’ve lost.
The P.S. . . . .
If you’re nearby: Thursday, June 12, from 1:30-3:00 at the Interlochen Library , I’ll be giving a craft talk: my topic: Coming to Terms with Disorder, Disruption, and Just Plain Evil. Even if you’re not registered for the retreat, you’re welcome to come.
Saturday, June 7, Crooked Tree District Library at Walloon Lake, 11:00.
July 19th, reading at the Bellaire Library, with Q & A