Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — January 18, 2004

As if to remind me of a fundamental contrariness in the nature
of things, certain signs of illness began to make themselves
known to me around 4pm on the Friday before this three-day
weekend. Apart from a few chronic structural problems, such as a
bad back, I’m quite healthy—rarely ill and even more
rarely ill enough to miss work. I’m also fairly sedentary
and don’t generally ask much beyond the minimum from my
body, or pay very much attention to it. So I’m always a
little surprised when it suddenly resists or refuses the more or
less automatic functioning that comprises most of its duties.

What I’ve experienced over the past couple of days is
nothing much: it’s what my mother has always called
“a bug,” making its presence known by mild nausea,
weakness, and headache. If survival depended on my walking ten
miles I could do it, but I really would rather not move any more
than necessary, and so have spent most of the weekend in the
recliner in the living room. And I can’t say that it has
been a totally unpleasant experience. I’ve had a little
reading, a little music, a little television, and a lot of
looking out the window.

It rained all day Saturday. I live on the Alabama Gulf coast
where even in January there is still a lot of green in the woods
across the way, including the dark gleam of a magnolia.
Throughout the day I watched the curtain of rain grow now more
dense, now more thin, constantly varying the mixture of silver,
grey, and green presented to me until the picture faded to
black.

Because it is such a rare experience, this sort of temporary
incapacity always serves me as a useful reminder that the body is
not only subject to temporary failure but will indeed fail
entirely one day. At the age of fifty-five this fact is
increasingly of interest to me. Once I had no particular
uneasiness about death, but that was only a failure of
imagination. Some Christians have, or say they have (I
don’t know whether to believe them or not) perfect
certainty that when death comes they will close their eyes and
wake up in heaven. I have some faith and a great deal of hope,
but I’m also a man of reason and I
don’t consider it utterly impossible that Christian
beliefs are false, or that if they are true there is any
guarantee that I will find myself among the sheep and not the
goats. The one thing of which I’m absolutely assured is
that, barring the Second Coming or some other direct intervention
by God, I am, as the old song says, going to walk that lonesome
valley, and I’m going to walk it by myself.

As I watched the rain fall I thought about the two live oaks
we’ve recently planted, one in the front yard and one in
the back. A few weeks ago my wife and I drove spikes of
fertilizer in the ground around them and have been waiting for
just such a good soaking rain as this. I thought with
satisfaction of the spikes getting wet, and wetter, slowly
dissolving, the nutrients seeping into the soil and being picked
up by the roots of our young trees. A full-grown live oak is one
of the most heartening sights in the world to me. They grow
slowly, and I won’t live to see these trees in their full
glory. But with some care and some luck (including a settlement
of a now-distant but inevitable territorial dispute between one of the trees and
the power lines) they will be magnificent
one day, and someone will get the joy of them. That is a fine
thought.