On Time...

For Seanchoice 8/13/26

Why is my hand on my father’s head? Obviously this is going in his album.

When I was young, and in Maine for a week in the summer, I recall sitting in a row boat, and being whisked away from the island back to mainland, away from the cabin we had spent a week with friends, and something about the water, the early morning air, the sea birds, the seasons hinting at turning, school starting, saying goodbye to my friends, maybe it was the sight of luggage, gave me a little pang of loneliness, for no apparent reason other than this I thought to myself, I wonder where my husband is right now, the man I will someday marry, I wonder where he is and what he is doing. But, being a mere tween, and many years away from all three of my future failed engagements, I let the thought slip by with the sea birds into the trees, and the skyline, and the mist, and the light.

This summer my father turns eighty. Eighty! How can Roland be EIGHTY. We say. No one can figure it out. No one knows. How am I thirty…