Cristina and I wander over to another section of the park and lie down on a grassy slope in the shade and watch the dazzle of young people playing Frisbee and chasing their children. Watching them, I feel about a hundred years old. Gordon is only twenty-one years away from being a hundred. He’s up there in his apartment, behind us, barely more than a loud call away. I imagine that were he to open his window, he might be able to hear us hailing him—could hear the same shouts of the children we are hearing—and that he could look down and see the specks of us lying here beneath this tree, unidentifiable, just two more tiny figures among so many hundreds of others.
It’s not fatigue that I’m feeling, I decide, but impatience; I still have work to do. And watching these young parents with their young children stirs a homesickness and nostalgia in me, which is quite an emotional cocktail indeed: the realization that my children are suddenly grown up. For the longest time, parenting was my identity. Now, although one never stops being a dad, the intensity of it has begun to wind down. Sometimes I can actually take a rest and reflect on all that sweet silliness adding up to—what? Love.
Cristina and I sit, waiting on Gordon’s call, until we decide that a cold beer would be nice. We want to stay close so that when he calls we can hurry over to meet him before he changes his mind or says it’s gotten too late. Cristina takes out her phone and speaks into it—“Where is the nearest dive bar?”—and, rising and brushing winter-dead grass fragments from our clothes, we begin following the directions, holding the phone in front of us like dowsers.
The inside of the bar is far too bleak, this sunny afternoon, so we go onto the back patio, which is reserved for the smokers, though there are none. We order our beers there in the courtyard with its rusty barbecue grill—if I’d known about this place, I would have borrowed it in advance of our picnic, would have grilled Amy a deer hindquarter.
It’s getting on toward that point in the day where, if we’re going to see Gordon with time to settle in over a glass of ginger brew, we’re going to have to do so soon. The tilt of light is doing that thing it does in late spring when it crosses some lower azimuth and each increment of sixty seconds seems to grow faster than the other minutes that have been melting all day long. But you pretend not to notice the quickening. After all, where is the skill in being one of the first to realize the party is coming to an end?
Cristina and I finish our first beer, order another, and then—now it truly is getting late—walk back to the park. I call Gordon and leave another message, saying we’ll be here just a while longer, but would still love to catch up.
With the light now bronze as it spills down the city’s corridors and canyons, we gather our bags and make our way to his apartment building, the site to which I’ve mailed so many postcards and letters over the decades. We greet the doorman and tell him we’re friends, and ask if we can leave something for Gordon—that we know he’s been feeling a little under the weather.
“Certainly,” the doorman says.
We hand him the big glass jar of the murky orange-gold fluid, beautiful in the coppery light, with fragments of lemon pulp and ginger thread spinning.
He looks at it both suspiciously and admiringly, clearly thinking, Hooch. “I’ll be certain to give it to Mr. Lish,” he says.
We walk back to the park and wait until dusk. How the city changes and enlivens when the first lights glimmer and warmth begins to leave the concrete. You can feel people’s hopes and dreams returning, seeping out as if through the cracks in their window jambs.
By now perhaps Amy’s apartment is empty. By now surely Gordon is readying for bed. We have to leave.
I don’t know if I’ll see him again. I’d like to, but it’s not what’s most important. What’s important is that he knows he is appreciated, admired. Thank you.