Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [8]
I soon moved to Boston, where I had been hired to be a professor of journalism. I was happy to land on my feet and pleased to be a teacher, something I had wanted to do for a long time. It was good to be back in New England, which was familiar, and almost home. By then, the divorce was fully final, my mother had passed away and my children were adults and on their own: Elizabeth in New York and Adam in Peru, where he had become a Roman Catholic brother. I missed them both terribly, and my mother too. The only things that had seemed to stay in place were the lumber and Paul.
Of course, I shouldn’t marvel at Paul’s reliability. We had grown up together and moved around together, and he knew something about the meaning of a home, even when it existed only as a pile of sticks destined to be a cabin.
I have been a lifelong fisherman and fortunate to have fished many places in the world. Once, while walking the flats with my fly rod under a bright sun in the Bahamas, I heard a piercing screech and saw a cleft shadow sweep across the water and over a school of cruising bonefish. There was panic in the shallow water, which suddenly boiled with frightened silvery fish. I looked up and saw a hawk between the sun and the water. The fish could not have seen the bird, and I doubt that they had heard its call. They had felt the swift dark wings between them and the sun in the form of a swiftly moving shadow. In their frightened rush to deeper water, I wondered, were they responding to the imminence of death, or to the fear of the emptiness that lurks behind death?
I had been in my new job in Boston for just over two years when, in 2006, I got the news that my uncle Babe was reaching the end of his fight with colon cancer. All of us in the family had called him Babe because he was the youngest of my mother’s three siblings. His real name was Thomas, which he definitely preferred to Babe, but to all of us he was Babe. The news of his fast decline had come to me from my aunt Judith in New York City. She was married to another of my uncles, John, my mother’s oldest brother. John and Judith had been an emotional shelter for me as I had stumbled through my divorce, offering reassurance and financial help, and their home in the East Village had been a haven for me more than once when my life was in serious emotional tumult. They had a big black sofa that I’d cover with a sheet and blanket and use as a bed. On the phone, Judith told me that she and John were going to New Jersey to visit Babe, who lived in a retirement community with his wife, Ruth. She was direct: this might be the last chance to see him alive. Did I want to come with them? I immediately said yes and took the train from Boston to New York.
I had sensed from Judith that John had been declining—he was in his eighties—but I was shocked when I reached their home, a loft on the fifth floor of a renovated factory building on East Fourth Street whose walls were covered with the art of their friends in the city. John seemed hardly to know me. He was welcoming as usual, and gave me a strong handshake and big hug, but he could not remember my name. He called me by the old Greek honorific palikari, or brave young man. (John’s parents, my grandparents, were from Greece, and Greek was his first language.) Together we sang the same verse from an old Greek folk song. First once, then twice, then a third time. He seemed unaware that we had just sung it. He was unusually reliant