Grief

Photograph by Paula Tatarunis

It was snowing when I left the tavern. A couple of inches had accumulated during the hour or so I’d been inside eating a fish sandwich, washing it down with a local IPA. I had just come back from Portland, Oregon. My daughter, Gabrielle, had died there four years before. Though she was buried here, in Midvale, Wisconsin, only a few blocks from the tavern, I had not visited her grave since the day of her funeral. Instead, every year, sometimes twice a year, I went out to Portland and stood on the banks of the Willamette River, near the spot where she’d fallen from the boat, and I read to her from one of the Moomintroll books that we’d read together when she was a child. I planned to read the entire series to her—all seven books. Yesterday, when I was reading to Gabrielle, holding Comet in Moominland in one hand and an umbrella in the other, a homeless man (Portland is a magnet for the homeless) sat down among the riverbank debris near me. I didn’t stop reading. One of the things I seemed to have lost when my daughter died was a sense of decorum —which is not only to say that I became the sort of person who could be found talking to himself in places that were less private than riverbanks. The homeless man, whose head was protected from the drizzle by a do-rag, listened respectfully and then, at a break in the story, asked me if I could spare a dollar. I gave him a five. He said, “Thanks for the memories,” and took himself and his valise down the shore, to where a man was fly-fishing. What could you catch in January?

The tavern was called the Melody Bar. I had played for its softball team for a number of years, until age and injuries sidelined me. Two of my former teammates, Jim Crabbe and Toby Belcher, were there the night I came back from Portland. I stopped at their table on my way out. While it was true that I had become the sort of person who talked to himself on the street, I had not given up the habit of being sociable. Crabbe, an electrician, pinkfaced and jolly, said, “Written any novels lately?” Belcher, a plumber who had a gap between his two upper front teeth that made him seem less lugubrious than he actually was, said, “Man, I wish I could retire and write my memoirs.” I put a ten on their table and told them to have a drink on me. Crabbe protested. Sir Toby, a skinflint, said, “If you insist.”

I decided to walk home rather than call a cab or Deborah, the young woman who lived in the apartment above me, with whom I had become friends. I had only a backpack to carry and only a couple of miles to go.

The sight of snow falling in the central Wisconsin city where I’d lived for all but a few of my fifty-eight years didn’t often stir me, but when I stepped out the tavern door and saw the flakes tumbling down in the light cast by the streetlamps, saw the boas of snow on the limbs of trees, saw how the snow softened and quieted everything as in a children’s picture book of yore, I felt energetic and happy, maybe even a little lightheaded. A few blocks on, the snow was blowing harder. I was wearing the thin jacket I’d worn around gray, damp Portland, and no hat or gloves. (When I’d flown west, it had been a springlike January day in Wisconsin, a day that had brought to the lips of too many the phrase “global warming.”) The snow on the sidewalk was now higher than the tops of my Rockports. My glasses had fogged up, but I could see well enough to tell that there was hardly anybody else out on the streets.

I sat down on...