Excerpt from A Postcard Memoir

"Fish Jump-Bonneville Fish Ladder"

When I was a little boy—who knows how little?—I was conscious that grown men had once been like me. But they had transformed into fathers of families they took to parks and sights and fed hot dogs and ice cream. It seemed often the case that the kids and the mother enjoyed the fish jumps while Dad kept his eyes up ahead on the bend of the road. Just as I was in tow to my parents, he was in tow to that bend, that future that curved back to being a son. When I was a little boy, I often wanted to hide behind bushes and peek at the world going by. That was better, for me, than seeing the sights. But parents want to know where you are. So what I wanted was to grow up and be free to get lost. Families would always try to find you, and as a dad, you had to let yourself be found. The fathers I saw in parks had been found for good. You could tell by the way they sat on benches waiting for kids to come back with their cones. I didn't know, as a kid watching fathers, that someday I'd jump as high as the fish, that being found once you were lost wasn't so easy.

"Patient Arriving"

When the time comes, I hope I'll be carrying as little mental luggage as possible. Wise to remember we know nothing of what happens, however vividly we've fantasized about it. Whether through Hell or Karma, we associate death with dread justice that cannot be evaded. I think that means death resembles who you are, takes on your own stink and light, is experienced by and is waiting only for you. Before he died William Burroughs used to ask how we all thought we knew we weren't dead already. Back in the 1970s I saw Alan Watts explaining on Public TV that from a Zen perspective he didn't really exist. He'd already died before they aired the show, so it was funny. It's possible we switch between Life (here) and Death (elsewhere) on a daily basis and attribute the choppiness of existence to our moods or dreams. Is the most frightening fantasy of death having no one there to talk to and be with, or thinking that thinking stops? Would I rather die in bed surrounded by my family, or simply in my sleep? Probably in my sleep. I'm still a baby, I don't know if I can die well. What if I screamed to my wife to make it stop just as it was happening and while the kids watched?

Copyright © 2000 by Lawrence Sutin. All rights reserved.