By Neil King Jr.
I was out fishing on the Miles River, alone in my canoe, when I got a call from an old friend of my parents and a neighbor from long ago. He had enjoyed the piece I wrote for The New York Times, he said, the one about cancer and wanting to do a few things just one more time. He wanted to thank me for writing it.
The pleasure craft going by on that late-spring afternoon sent out wakes that rocked my Kevlar canoe, side to side in a lulling motion as my old neighbor spoke of his Covid confinement and his worries, at 92, that the virus might take him. He summoned memories of looking out his high window in the late 1960s at us kids riding bikes on the street below: lanky, fearless kids enveloped in a magnificent present, with an eternity stretched out before us. When he mentioned that memory, I saw the kids on the street but also felt the warmth of the sun pouring through the window, as though all at once you could be both the kids in the street and the man peering down from above.
“I have followed your career, thanks to your mom,” he said. He spoke with that same drill sergeant’s voice he had at 40 when he was ramrod straight and gave no guff. The years had inserted their hesitations. They had gummed up the recall of a few names. But otherwise, judging just by his voice, he was little changed. It was as though the past had called and found me out fishing. “You have done well,” he said.
When he said the word career I thought of that wheeled vehicle—carrus—that is its Latin root. How you get in that vehicle and off you go at a gallop, careening down this street and that, rocky patches, smooth patches, long stretches of straightaway, hairpin turns one after the other and after that another long straight stretch. He was speaking to me as an old man, an old man to a not-yet old man, but a large part of me still shared the magnificent present of that kid on the bike, just as a large part of him shared the ramrod straightness of the man, 50 years ago, who peered from that high window.
We have had our careers, our long runs at it, our rides in the wheeled vehicle, and now he was shut in his house hoping not to die and I was out bobbing in the wakes of pleasure craft. I kept casting while we talked, and a couple of times I felt a distinct tug on my lure but hauled in no fish.
I thought of the summer when I was 14 or so and went down to New Mexico with his son and daughter to spend a week in the hacienda of his ex-wife’s family. His son and I were the same age, while his daughter was two years younger, and the most gorgeous thing I would see all summer. I could still feel a touch of heartache when I thought of that week and the morning we went out riding horses through the arroyos. He laughed when I confessed my crush. He said, “Well, I should let you go before you fall out of your canoe and drown.”
“Wouldn’t that be funny,” I said.
We gave one another a hearty farewell, knowing we weren’t likely to talk again.
-v-