Each day this week, as I walked to work along the canal, I watched the maples leaves unfurl, spread and stretch. On Monday, they seemed barely more than swollen buds. On Tuesday, they dangled delicately below the sprays of pale yellow flowers: opening like the wings of tiny bats, with russet membranes still lying limp between the veins. On Wednesday, they had stiffened slightly, but still felt as soft as cobwebs to the touch. A faint green had started to spread outward on each leaf. On Thursday, the leaves had achieved a smaller version of their final form, and only a faint red lingered near the tips of each lobe. On Friday, I walked to work in the thin, shade of the trees and the fall of the first spent maple blossoms.
More rain came on Saturday, never hard, but steady all day. It brought down the remaining maple blossoms, leaving each tree surrounded by a yellow carpet that matched exactly the extent of its canopy. Slick black pavement glistened between each circle of blossoms. Sue and I stayed inside most of the day, tending to small chores and resting. I returned to reading A Cape Cod Journal, by Erma Fisk, and took some time also to read portions of the June issue of Vanity Fair.
I hadn't heard of Irma Fisk until I picked up her book at the Public Library. I had gone looking unsuccessfully for Henry Beston's book, Outermost House, but settled for Fisk's book because of the similar setting and theme. Not surprisingly, I find that Fisk approved of Beston, quoting the same passage about wildlife that I stumbled upon last autumn. "In a world older and more complete than ours, they move gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost, or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." I don't know much about Fisk yet, only that she seems to have lived most of her final years in beach house on Cape Cod, travelling to conduct bird research and to promote her earlier books. She came late to writing, compiling a lifetime of travel, observation, and empathy in a handful of books. Whether describing the terns nesting across the river, or speculating about the faceless book editor at the other end of the telephone line, she brings human warmth to her writing.
"From his voice I had thought I knew this man, discerning intelligence, generosity, humor, but each person is like a shuttered house. We may peer in windows, rap at the door, but only rarely are we admitted, and then only so far. Only a few times in life do we stay, welcome and loved: drink coffee or wine, eat dinner, sleep with the owner, scramble eggs for breakfast. There are too many closed doors, too many halls where only children may run. Mostly we stand outside, noting how the shifts of light, of sun and shadow, alter our perspective. Curious, frustrated."
A Cape Cod Journal was published in 1990, shortly after Fisk's death. I confess to flipping ahead to the last page, where Fisk alludes to her approaching mortality. Having read those last, marvelously intimate words, I feel terribly reluctant to read the intervening pages, knowing that I will need to surrender myself to the loss of new friend.
I doubt that Christopher Hitchens and I could ever have become friends. I suspect that he would have scoffed at my religiousity, and I hold little regard for his rhetorical excesses in that regard. However, like Irma Fisk, he writes at the threshold of death, and with equal if not greater humanity. I found his essay in this month's Vanity Fair, on the physical loss of his voice to cancer, as one of the most eloquent and moving pieces of prose that I've ever read. I know that many religious people (secretly, perhaps, in the darker recesses of their minds) view Hitchens' cancer as divine justice -- as though we Christians don't get cancer. I know that some hope that Hitchens will undergo a deathbed conversion, although not for his own sake. I don't agree. I would like Hitchens to maintain his integrity in the face of the greatest uncertainty. I think that God values humanity above worship, and I think that he enjoys a good conversation.
