Sunday Night Journal — November 16, 2008
So we made a quick overnight trip for my uncle Ed’s funeral, leaving here on Friday morning, driving 350 miles (560km) to Athens, Alabama, leaving there on Saturday afternoon and driving the 350 miles back, arriving around 11pm. I’ve gotten so accustomed to the warm and colorless autumn of the Gulf Coast that I sometimes forget how different it is in the Tennessee Valley, a long low stretch of land running alongside the Tennessee River in north Alabama. At a rest stop north of Birmingham I found myself almost hypnotized by the deep red leaves falling from some ornamental tree. It was a sunny morning when we left on Friday, and cold, dark, and raining when we arrived in Athens around 6pm. The weather for the funeral on Saturday afternoon was chilly, windy, and gray. Partway through the graveside service the sun came out, as if providentially; then as soon as the service was over the clouds closed in again and it began to rain, hard. I was grateful for that bit of sun, as I suppose was everyone.
I would be dishonest if I said that I felt a deep personal grief at Ed’s passing. For thirty years or more I had seen him only briefly at holidays. And he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, and I don’t think we’re obliged to wish many years of Alzheimer’s on anyone. More than an immediate personal loss, I felt the melancholy of seeing another of my parents’ generation leave the world’s stage. At the funeral I saw many of them for the first time in six or seven years, and was struck by how much more frail some of them seemed. For the first twenty years or so of my life they were the adult world, and that’s the way they’ve remained in my mind, even as they disappear one by one, leaving my generation as the eldest. It’s disconcerting.
I have the sense of a world slipping away. Whenever I visit my old home ground I’m vividly aware of how it has shaped me. I suppose people who stay where they were raised and spend their whole lives among the same people are more strongly and continually shaped, but those of us who move away may be more conscious of the influence, and every visit becomes an occasion for examining that influence, for seeing it in a slightly different—and, one hopes, slightly clearer—light. But one never gets quite the clarity one wants, because home has, of course, been changing all along. There’s an unnoticed expectation that the return will be a return in time as well as in space, and an almost unnoticed mild jolt and adjustment when it is not. Little by little, the world into which I was born disappears, and one day I’ll follow it and exist, as far as earthly life can tell, only in the past.
I like seeing people who were a part of my childhood and youth—cousins and friends at this funeral, for instance. Even though we aren’t close—we’re like the branches of a plant that get further apart as they grow—there’s a sense of deep acquaintance among us that comes (on my part, anyway) from that sense of shared roots. We know the world that used to be, and when we mention certain times or people or places we know that the other recognizes them, that they aren’t just meaningless items in a list. Even though we are very different people who don’t necessarily have a lot in common, we do share that history and are parts of that world, the world that impressed itself upon us when we were at our most impressionable.
The natural world plays its part, too, in some ways a stronger part, because it has changed less. The little country crossroads where I grew up is not a beautiful place, or at least not the kind of place that I would seek out for its beauty. It’s flat and open, with not nearly enough trees to suit me; it’s parched and dusty in summer, damp and drab in winter. Yet it has a lonely beauty I often remember, and am always glad to see when I return.
When we were there on Saturday the weather was cloudy and cold. I remember many, many such days, in late autumn or winter: the vast fields, either bare earth or something brown and dead, with pale leafless woods and dark hills on the horizons, the sky a dull grey, crows calling, ducks and geese passing high toward one of the wildlife refuges run by the TVA, the light failing early.
Sometimes I went hunting on such days, or what I called hunting. I never had any desire at all to kill anything (and that’s not self-praise; it’s arguably a sign of decadence). But I sometimes took a gun and went walking in the fields and woods and called it hunting. In that time and place, and perhaps still, once a boy had learned basic gun safety at the age of twelve or so he was free to take a gun and hunt whenever or wherever it was permissible. There were a bolt-action .22 rifle and a single-shot 20-gauge shotgun that I used—I liked them because they were simple and easy to shoot—and I would take one with me, shooting now and then at a crow or a squirrel or, maybe, a rabbit, almost never hitting anything. It was just an excuse to wander alone outdoors.
At the heart of that drab brown and grey season was the color and light of Christmas, and so Christmas has always been to me, a burst of brilliant life in a dead or dying world, which of course it is, whether or not one’s environment emphasizes the contrast. I’m glad mine did.
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Light On Dark Water 
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