Sacred Time Read Free

because then we could take delight in how they changed and yet stayed the same with each telling. And as we urged each other on, I felt the presence of untold stories—there already, beyond all of us in the future—shaping themselves within the body of my family, waiting for us to live these stories.
    And to tell them.

    Great-Aunt Camilla found her stories in foreign countries. Since she enjoyed traveling alone, she was a mystery to my family, but I liked mysteries, liked picking her up at the West Side docks, where the water was dark green and murky with oil slicks and trash, where the air smelled of tar and hot dogs, and where I got to see ocean liners when she returned with her faraway stories and faraway presents. One day, Great-Aunt Camilla gave me a tour of the Mauretania. Four other ocean liners were tied to the docks, and a barge with long rollers was alongside the Île de France, painting the hull. When my mother bought me a hot dog, I tossed the end of my bun to the seagulls, and as they fought over it, the horn of a tug-boat shut them out. It had a big M on its stack. “That means ‘Moran,’” Great-Aunt Camilla had told me, and I’d wished she would take me on one of her trips.
    My favorite story of all was how my grandmother had saved my grandfather from drowning. My mother had named her Riptide. If it were not for Riptide, none of us would be alive. Not that she had rescued all of us, but she had rescued my grandfather when he was not my grandfather yet, not her husband yet, but just Emilio Amedeo, standing in the surf at Rockaway Beach up to his waist.
    â€œThe first day I saw him, I rescued him.” That’s how she always started the part of the story that was hers, the part where she’s sunning herself, wearing her new white swimsuit, when this young man suddenly topples and is pulled out to sea. One of his arms shoots up, then his face, open-mouthed. While she leaps up, races toward the water, dives in, and swims out to where he’s drowning. “Hold on to me,” she shouts and reaches for him. She’s swimming on her back, one arm around him as if they were hugging, and he floats with her, resting on her body. “If we fight against the current, it’ll tire us,” she tells him. “All we need to do is wait…let the tide take us to where it weakens…then swim out of it.” For a minute or so my grandfather floats with her, but when the tide sweeps them out farther, he panics, because it’s obvious she’s some rare kind of water-being, a manatee, or a siren, luring him deeper into her territory. As he struggles to free himself, she flips from beneath him, emerges behind him, grasps him around the middle. “I’m going to save you,” her woman-voice shouts into his ear, “you have no choice there. But you…can make it easier for me to save you…if you quiet down. If you can’t do that…I’ll knock you out and…drag you to shore.” He feels her breath against his left ear, against the left side of his neck, breath that rides on her shouting. “But save you I will. The one…choice you have is to make it look like we’re swimming back…together. And then you don’t have to admit to anyone that a woman saved you.”
    But it’s my grandfather who revealed the story of his rescue. Who still liked to tell it, urged on by us.
    â€œLet Emilio tell that part.”
    â€œHe does it so well.”
    He’d wait till Riptide finished and then he’d continue the story from the moment when he quieted. Against all panic. Because, out there, in this woman’s fierce embrace, he understands that she’ll make true on her promise to save him. In her fierce embrace, he understands that he’ll ask her to marry him—water-being or woman—once they’re back on shore. And because he’s afraid of her slipping away from him forever once they