Coming into the End Zone Read Free Page B

that bind us (‘my children are now all out of the nest,’ they write on the blank side of the card, ‘as yours must be’) or the call out of the blue, like the one this afternoon. ‘Remember me from St. Joseph’s parish in Des Moines? We met at the rectory.’
    Thirty-five years ago. My perfect memory fails me. I do not remember, neither the name nor the face nor the occasion. We have not maintained the ritual of greeting cards, and so I have entirely forgotten this man. There were no artificial reasons for getting together, like reunions. But now he is in Washington, and eager to remind me of what I have forgotten.
    Should I ask him to dinner, as he seems to hope? No, the rituals have given way. I beg off, being overly committed, or leaving town, or something. I don’t remember what I said. I’m sorry. Are your children out of the nest? Of course. It’s been a long time. I’m sorry. Goodbye.
    I cannot remember his name after I hang up. So it goes.
    It is the hottest summer in this city’s history. This morning, on the deck where I drink coffee and read the newspaper while looking out at the dry elm and the roofs already wet with humidity, it is already eighty-five degrees at six. I think with longing of the sea, where I was in early June, on the bay end of Delaware, close to the ocean but not yet at it. On that coast there is curiously odorless ocean, unlike the heavily weighted-with-salt smells, the fishy, spicy odors, of Maine.
    I chose to spend two weeks there because my sense of being alive depends on periodic exposure to the sea. I need to swim and float in it. I need to sit at its edge and watch its moody, heavy, unpredictable vastness. I must stroll its wrack to find treasures of stone, shell, bits of glass and wood, even, occasionally, a piece of ‘sea’ porcelain which I fantasize as breakfast crockery from a shipwrecked schooner. The ocean restores to me an acceptance of the way the world is now, consoles me for my losses of faith, optimism, physical pleasure, great expectations, mother, sister, grandmother, and young, plague-ridden friends.
    Sunk down into the intense heat and humidity of this July morning, I manage to ‘cool off’ by thinking of the dunes at Lewes where I sat, shielded against the wind, on a deserted beach. I watched the Cape May ferry make its haughty, aristocratic way across the water, a white wedding cake of a ship on an empty ocean, looking as out of place as a skyscraper would at the beach. My memory restores the ship, the cool sand, the grey eternal sea. Perspiration and mortality sit less heavily upon me.
    A remnant of cool air from the night clings to the deck. I finish my coffee and take up my battered clipboard, a piece of equipment as necessary to me as radar to a flight traffic officer. I bought this board in 1960. It has held in its rusty iron jaws at the top of a spotted brown length of board every piece of white lined paper on which I have written to this time. The corners of the pressed board have rounded with use and are now flaking away. In ink, with small script, I have written the names of nine books composed on its surface, their dates, and the places to which the board traveled with me.
    Having nothing better to do, the immortal prose I summoned this morning somehow not having arrived, I study the places. Albany, New York. Moody Beach, Maine. MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Iowa Writers Workshop. St. Maarten. St. John, Virgin Islands. A bank of the Delaware River. Cozumel, Mexico. Kailuum, Mexico. Surry, Maine. Lewes, Delaware.…
    Superstition has persuaded me that the words I require often come not from my hand, my pen, or my head but from my clipboard’s thin pressed-board interior. To bolster this belief, I once took a strip of printed plastic left behind by the previous writer-occupant of my office in Iowa, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and pasted it