The writing on the wall

It's not what you think.

The same day that my friend Colin published this essay, about his mom dying, I had been thinking a lot about my dad. Not about his death last year, although that’s been on my mind, but the way he took Death.

The way you take a joke, the way you take some news — “I hope she takes that the right way” — it says something about you. 

My parents had a lot of quirks. But they took Death in the right spirit. (heh)

Like this time …

When I was in my 20s, my parents separated, and my dad rented a small apartment not far from my mom. 

One day, I stopped by to see him. I’d graduated from college, and I was still adjusting to my parents living their separate lives. Unlike kids who go through their parents’ divorce at, say, age 10, my brother and I didn’t have to negotiate weekends with Mom vs. Dad. They just split up, and we all made awkward dinner plans. 

On this particular day, I walked into his kitchen and I was startled to see a phrase in Latin, scrawled in big black letters on the wall behind Dad’s stove:

Think about that. Not the Latin, which I’ll translate in a sec — but your newly separated dad, scrawling some old saying in black Sharpie on the kitchen wall. Above the stove.  

It was weird. We weren’t a bohemian, write-some-Latin-graffitti-in-the-kitchen-if-you-feel-like-it kind of family. And while I wanted to scream — DAD, HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND, ARE YOU OK? YOU AND MOM HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN SPLIT UP THAT LONG, DID YOU ALWAYS WANT TO WRITE ON THE WALLS? I DON’T EVEN GET IT, DAD —I think I was too shocked. 

So I probably said something like: “Uh, wow.”

I’m omw, yo

So Dad explained that, once upon a time, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes gave a speech on the occasion of his 90th birthday. (I had no idea who he was talking about, or whether this was last week or what.) And apparently, Holmes concluded his address by quoting a short phrase attributed to Virgil: 

Mors aurem vellens — Vivite ait venio

Which means, Dad said¹: 

Death plucks at his ear — [and says] Live, I am coming.

Live, I am coming.

Needless to say, my own mortality was a newborn thought. Never mind my father’s. And suddenly I get the whole thing in one short phrase, cast on the wall above the kitchen stove.

A two-way street river

In his essay, Colin describes something he and I can both see from our respective perches at opposite ends of this crazy city, and that’s the ebb and flow (and ebb and flow) of the Hudson River: 

Before Henry Hudson showed up, the locals called the Hudson River the river that flows both ways. When the tide comes into New York Harbor, the water flows north, toward the river’s source in the Adirondack Mountains. When the tide went back out, the river would resume flowing into the ocean.

As a city kid who grew up on the banks of that river, the movement of the Hudson was a daily event that I was completely immersed in, and utterly ignorant of. I didn’t know the Hudson River flowed with the tides until maybe last week.

Here’s what I did know. 

Sometimes there was water down in the cove in the park. 

Some days there was nothing but mud. 

Also: Big jaggedy rocks lined the edge of the river bank (dumped there after they excavated the subway a thousand years ago, my mom said). 

Either way, water, mud or rocks, your mom would KILL YOU if you went anywhere near that filth —  GetoffathoserocksrightnowORELSE!

The fate of guppies

But there was a teensy problem. In the river back then, there were guppies. And guppies, needless to say, had to be harvested in a narsty plastic bag one of us maybe just took out of the trash can over there. Or from the gutter. 

In those days in NYC garbage was a fact: plentiful, and not always in a bad way. That was the era of the real soda pop-tops, the ones that dug into the dirt like coins. You could fold each sharp metal tongue over the ring of the next one to make a chain. That didn’t help with guppies, but it was something to do. And sometimes you found a styrofoam coffee cup to scoop the guppies into, or a potato chip bag. 

What is it with kids and other small living beings? And trash? We’d risk our very lives to catch a couple of tiny, squirming fish, knowing full well that one of us, inevitably, was going to get their cheap Pathmark socks wet when there was a strategic overreach, or a slippery patch on the rocks. And god forbid someone got that gross green smelly river muck on their leg.

But what do kids know from inevitable? If someone found one of those pleated Italian icey cups that could hold some brackish water and a few guppies, you went for it, duh. (Pretty sure “duh” was invented in my park.) Whatever happened. That happened. Didn’t matter that every single guppy expedition ended the same way. Crying kid. Screaming mom. Never gonna do that again jesus. 

Then a few days later, someone would find a plastic bag in the trash … 

About time

Live, I am coming

In the kitchen, a 20-something kid and her 50-something dad….A glimpse of mortality, sure —

But also an intimation of middle age. Just enough to draw back the curtain on something my father was facing, as yet invisible to me, which was: the time he had left.

Death did pluck at his ear. It plucks at mine now. Some translations of Virgil’s line (if the line was his), use the word “tweaks” or “twitches” or “tugs” or “pulls.” I love that. No grim guy with a scythe slinking around. Or quietly drawing up in a carriage. Or sauntering around in a tank top.

Death is in your face here. A pain in the ass. But you can’t argue the point. 

Related:
Soda pop top timeline

History of rocks

1. I fact-checked Dad’s story and the quote on Quote Investigator, which seems legit.