“…having missed my time I choose a simple life.” – Tao Yuanming

12.29.24. 0903 hrs.

Sunday. Back on the river. Spent the week focused on holiday celebrations and battling the seasonal ick. In my previous incarnation as a college instructor, I almost always got sick around Christmas. It was the only time I could allow my body in the inconvenience of an illness; there was no paid sick time, no health insurance for most of the time, and by the time I had insurance… because Amanda insisted on adding me to hers when we got married (and thank God for that)… I was nearly finished with my time in higher ed… or to be more specific, higher ed was nearly finished with me.

This recent bought of ick, though, I’d managed to keep at bay and thought I had it licked; but that’s what I get for being optimistic. Holidays are a wonderful time to see people I don’t normally get to see, though except for my brother who lives in Cleveland, I’m not entirely sure that the extended relatives I see would be all that disappointed if I wasn’t there. And he, maybe just slightly. The rest of them, by and large, find me odd. I don’t think they’re wrong. My wife’s extended family is still a mystery to me, and try as I did at one point to connect with them, we’ve all settled into a routine that works for everyone. I go to holiday celebrations because she wants me there and they tolerate me because I make her happy.

Detente can be a good thing.

Down on the boat detente is also the name of the game. With the Mayor Andrew Broaddus fully back from shipyard and fully operational, there’s been office shuffling upstairs and opinions in the deck room. I will occasionally speak on such things, but office politics bore me as much as current domestic and global politics leave me in a sort of silent horror. In such situations, the salve is the same: an appreciation of the absurd and a deep dive into words.

Breakfast with the herons

Watching them off the stern third deck of the Mary M. Miller on rounds, I once again wish I had a better camera, or that I knew better how to work make the camera on my phone match the view I see. Herons in the water swim differently than ducks. Ducks kick and priss across the top of the water. It’s clear at first glance that they’re birds. The herons keep their bodies submerged, except for occasionally flapping them to air them out. I’ve read that they displace the water with their wings and feet to better hunt for food… in essence, they swim more like humans than like birds. Ducks will do short dives for food or to cool off; herons will deep dive and then pop up 12 or 15, sometimes 20 feet in another direction like Olympic underwater swimmers.  They sometimes roost behind the Mary M. Miller, in front of the Belvedere, where there’s some occasionally exposed concrete and mud that catches large drift heading down river.

I’ve adopted the Great Blue Heron as a sort of sigil, so when I see them, I  pay attention. Writing for me isn’t all that different from how the heron fishes; kick and displace, head above water, waiting for the right moment to dive.

The river was calm when I got to work, though it was still raining a little. As the day wears on, the wind picks up and the water kicks up. South bound tugs have to dig in to fight the waves and wind to push their loads through the bridges and into the lock.

1325 hrs.

Today is a good day to push my way back into a regular winter work schedule. For lunch I brought chicken noodle soup, and I read from a collection of Nelson Algren’s short fiction called Entrapment and Other Writings. He remains one of my favorite writers. Once marked for greatness by none other than Ernest Hemingway and lauded by the American literati,  he found himself on J. Edgar Hoover’s list of subversives after the publication of Man With the Golden Arm. That’s what honesty and a good vocabulary will get you.  I read these kids, here on Substack and in the polluted social media byways — some solid, solid writers, mind you — that write as if they’re the first generation to discover exile, solitude, and wandering. They act like they’re the first generation to hate the time clock and the grind. I remember feeling that way too, foolish youth I was. The only thing that saved me from an absolute hubris that I can be prone to was writers like Algren and Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted by  the McCarthy Era Hollywood Executives, not because because of his writings so much as because of his politics.

Being a writer in America today means pushing forward against the wind and waves and sometimes knowing how to deep dive for the good bits. I have a lot of faith in the kids I read. This marks me a little different than a lot of the people I see who embrace or at least grudgingly accept the marketing department created label “GEN X.” I watch my daughter doing the Good Work of the World at a local homeless shelter for women while she’s finishing school and still finding energy and focus for her family.  I watch my granddaughter, who is 4, learning to walk in an albeit necessarily sheltered world. One must have faith. And one must be willing to both deep dive beneath the waves or spread wings and fly.

I’m grateful for my job here at Mile Post 604. It allows me to write without having to worry more than than the average working person about how to keep a roof over the heads of my wife, our three dogs, one thoroughly ungrateful cat, and me.  It’s been over a year since my hip surgery, and nearly all the pensiveness from years of being in pain is gone.  My marriage is a wonderful solace and source of energy and comfort. My daughter is finding her way in the world. It’s a good life and worth living.

There was a time when such simple things would have made me think my life had summed up to a failure: over-educated and missed the mark. Both professionally and creatively, I seem to miss those important windows of opportunity. But I stay close to my subject… close to sources, as Algren said. There are worlds of stories that need telling. Poems that need written about things no one sees or pays attention to. That’s where you’ll find me as the new year opens.

[Originally published at: https://open.substack.com/pub/eymick/p/breakfast-with-the-herons]