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Show that have been secured, I make my way to Bryan's side, not looking down at my father below, or his hands lifted in supplication, or into his eyes squinting against the weak sun; I reach him just as he begins to really cry and pull his twenty-pound body to safety. He does not come crashing to the earth, is once again spared by Pele, and my father credits me with saving his lifeA We lock the door that leads to nowhere\and finish the deck by the time summer begins. But the experience will always feel like a loss to me. Because of what happens next, I suppose, the moment will never feel like enough when stacked against the chain of undoing that will shuttle me out of childhood forever and leave me carrying the world. I sometimes wonder if moments exist, maybe before the sandbox on top of the bomb shelter, the ambulance in our driveway, the birth of my brothers and my sense of duty, in which I saw the world not as a problem to be solved but simply a place to inhabit. Sometimes I wonder if I arrived in this world feeling inadequate. Then I remember the bucket and the knowledge that I was born making up for my lack, and the way I see the world at the age of seven or thirty-seven suddenly makes sense. Now it is summer and we are playing in the above ground swimming pool in our backyard. The pool stands four feet high, and my father has built a wooden deck with stairs we can climb to be even with the top of the pool. Because Scott and I spent our first years in Hawaii, we swim like fish. Bryan sits on the redwood deck in his cloth diaper and watches the two of us play. My mother is there as well, weeding around the base of 68 |
