By Scott Graber
When my father retired he moved — along with my mother — to a cabin at Land’s End on St Helena Island.
The house was small — maybe four rooms — but came with a large fireplace and sliding glass doors that looked out upon Port Royal Sound. At night (especially in the Fall and Spring) it was possible to open the glass doors and to sleep with a wind blowing over one’s face; the sound of the waves providing the play-list.
My father — a man who spent his life writing about infection — spent his retirement doing small tasks.
Those tasks usually involved toilet repair; and the incremental application of parquet flooring throughout. But he also liked to engrave small brass rectangles and then screw these plaques on benches, picture frames and the odd, mismatched furniture that filled the house.
The engraved letters (on the plaques) were uneven, and tilted, some having the names of his children; or a date and place (“Landstuhl, 1962”) where we had once lived as a family during his 20-year tenure in the Army. But whether it was primitive engraving, or replacing the flushing mechanism in the toilet, he would show these efforts to my mother.
When I would visit, mother would take me aside, saying, “Your father can’t do any task, however simple, without asking me to view it and to praise his craftsmanship. He’s driving me crazy.”
Now, 30 years later, I am retired and also filling my life with small tasks.
These tasks involve yard work centering on the magnolia leaves that reliably fall overnight. Occasionally the leaves are few and scattered; but usually they cover the yard like wall to wall carpeting.
And yes, when I’m done I run into the house and ask Susan to come out and admire my work. This need for positive, approving comment has apparently been passed down, intact, from father to son.
Once I did serious work in front of a judge (or jury) and thereafter that work was filed of record in the Courthouse. I suppose this record was done for someone to examine at a later date. But now I do unfiled, unremembered work of little consequence other than, perhaps, to amuse an early morning dog-walker who undoubtedly thinks, “My God, he’s in the yard again!”
“And to think he once did serious, consequential work in front of a judge …”
Usually I do my leaf work early; when it is still cool outside and the noseeums are not yet awake. I try to focus on the process — to actually focus on piercing each errant, fugitive magnolia leaf with a two-forked fireplace poker.
This coincides with a small flirtation with Buddhism — actually an intellectual flirtation with Pema Chodron, who is a Buddhist nun who writes, “The key here is to be here, fully connected to the moment, paying attention to the details of ordinary life.”
“When we scrub a vegetable, or brush our hair, we are expressing appreciation; friendship towards ourselves and toward the living quality that is found in everything.”
But this is hard for me.
It’s hard because I have always enjoyed a varietal and colorful stream of consciousness that usually takes me away from the here and now, transporting me into a column I am trying to compose; or into taxes I’m trying to calculate.
This movie in my head — actually a kind of river running though my mind — comes without commercials and is almost unstoppable.
“Focus on these damned leaves; or the smell of the now-blooming pittosporum; notice the purple intensity of the wisteria currently strangling a hapless, helpless, nearby palmetto,”
It’s also hard because my life has been one of anticipation — a trip to Italy or Abuja; sometimes a vertical trek up Black Balsam Knob. But these days I’m in Port Royal; “on the beach” as a former petty officer would say.
This is not the old age that I envisioned. I thought I would be forever hiking, biking, floating on the Niger River just north of Bamako. I did not think I would be waist-high in holly ferns, trying to cull-out those leaves that have gone brown. I did not think my retirement would be one of “staying in the moment.”
But sometimes I do think back to my retired father and his small brass plaques; and see him reading “Rousseau and Revolution” on his duly-engraved bench atop the bluff.
And I do hope he looked up, occasionally, and caught the magically-alive light as it played across the surface of the Sound.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.