By the River Bank

A true story from last week:

I was tired. I had spent the morning doing the worst thing I had ever done (cleaning a fridge full of food left to rot for four months. Think millions of maggots).  That afternoon (since I was helping my dad out with his apartments), I was running around getting renters in, out, supplied with keys and cleaning supplies…blah blah blah. I was tired so I went to the river.

I was reading at my favorite beach on the Mississippi when a man in his forties ran by me yelling: “don’t judge me! I’m gonna skinny dip!”

“Great!” I called back.

He jumped in naked and very drunk.

“How’s the water?” I called. The report was good, so I dove in too, careful to avoid him. I swam way out. I love swimming way out into the current where there is only sky and water. I watched from afar as he got out and joined a friend. Luckily my glasses were off so I couldn’t make out any shapes only the color of his nakedness. When I got in to shore, I was alone with the beach. I read a little from the Bible, but started to drift off. Putting the bible under my head, I fell asleep.

I was awoken by the skinny dipper. “Hey want to smoke some weed?” He asked, now in clothes.

“No, don’t smoke,” I told him.

“Oh, do you have any weed?” he asked.

“No.”

“Want to drink some beer with us at our boathouse?”

“Maybe, I am driving so probably not. But I’ll come over.”

“Is that poetry?” he asked, “looking at my copy of Good Poems for Hard Times selected by Garrison Keillor, “You should bring that. My dad taught me literature. He was an English major at the University of Minnesota.”

We walked to his friend’s boathouse where I was greeted by Tom. Tom was drunk, standing on the gangway, peeing into the river. Welcoming, I thought. Then Pat, a wiry old-timer smoking a cigarette greeted me.

“What are you some kind of scholar?” Tom sneered seeing the bible and book of poetry.

“Read us a poem”, Mark (the skinny dipper) said. So settling into a chair on the porch, I did. It was Unharvested by Robert Frost about an apple tree he smells on the other side of a stone fence. He ends by saying “may something go always unharvested/ may much stay out of our stated plan,/Apples or something forgotten and left,/ so smelling their sweetness would be no theft.”

“I don’t get this crap!” Tom said. So we went through the poem, line by line. But still Tom didn’t get. “Is there sex in it?”

“I think the apple represents sex.” Mark said.

“I want a love poem. My girlfriend broke up with me” Tom said.

So I found a poem called, “Are You Tired of Me Darling.”

“That’s crap! I could write a better one!” Tom yelled. “I don’t understand this shit.”

Tom told us a lot about how nothing made sense to him, as he drained a beer.

Let me read one about death, I suggested. So I read a Mary Oliver poem that I had recently read at a friend’s funeral:

“ . . . When death comes/like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,/I want to step through the door full of curiosity wondering/ what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? . . .”

Again, Tom thought this poem was no good. We began to talk about death. At some point I said, ”no one is ready to die.”

Tom suddenly seemed to sober up. That is a lie! My sister is ready to die. She is trying to drink herself to death. Yeah, Tom was right. There are definitely people out there who are ready to die.

Then Tom, unexpectedly invited me to take a tour of his boathouse. It was sparse. On the wall was a painting. “Wow that is awesome.” I said.

“You like it?” Tom asked.

“Yeah! Who did it?”

“I did.” Tom said. Then he brought me up and showed me two more.

His paintings were on pallet boards nailed together–black fields with white sprayed over, one in the shape of a horizon, one like a snowy mountain, and one that was just a flecked design. “You’re an artist.” I said.

“I am? No one has ever said that before.”

“Dude you should paint at least ten more!” I told him.

Then we went back downstairs. Mark wanted another poem. So I read Psalm 1. When I got to “like a tree/ planted by streams of water” that line hit home for these houseboat dwellers. I read another poem, but Pat and Mark wanted me to read Psalm 1 again. When I finished, Pat took a drag on his cigarette. “That’s a good poem.”

It was getting late, so I took my leave. Tom shook my hand and thanked me, still drunk.

And that is a true story. Hope you enjoyed.