2001-12-01 - 10:06 a.m.

what I did last tuesday, third-person-style:

He liked hearing the rake scratch the grass, ushering the leaves into orderly piles, the wooden handle vibrating in his hands. He liked it more than he ever did as a boy, when raking was a chore. Then, he would mope out to the yard after him brothers had already begun raking, and wish he wasn�t there. Then, he would listen to his walkman to pass the time, not the scratch of metal on grass that soothed him now, and wish the yard was smaller.

Now that he was living in the city and raking was no longer a necessity, he found he could enjoy it more. Just a small yard, a few bags� worth of leaves, a chance to do something for Gram, who had long since given up the rake. He enjoyed just being here, in his grandmother�s yard, on a random Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps he enjoyed being here because it, too, happened so rarely.

Today he didn�t have much time to enjoy himself. Liz would be waiting at school. He jammed the last of the leaves into a bag and went inside to check the time.

�How you doing out there, David?� Gram asked from her usual seat in the living room.

�Oh, pretty good,� David said. He smiled in at her, then stopped at the bathroom for a Kleenex. His nose always seemed to run when he visited family. �There�s still some more to be done, but I have to pick up Liz soon.�

As he went back out to line up the filled bags at the back of the house, Gram stood slowly and maneuvered into the kitchen behind her walker. On the counter were the two bags she had prepared. She handed them to David as he stepped inside.

�This one�s for you all, and this one�s for the dog,� she said, handing him a bag with two fruitcakes and another with some old scraps of meat. �And this is for you,� she said, handing him a check.

He always made a show of not wanting the money, but knowing she would not accept no for an answer, cut the objection short. Instead, he exclaimed, �Gram! What am I gonna do with you,� thanked her and kissed her goodbye.

Then he was rolling out of Lynn. He knew he didn�t have much time, and made it worse by turning left instead of right and wandering two miles out of his way. He realized it when he wound up in downtown Wakefield and turned around.

Liz was standing at the curb outside the high school. Each time he saw her she seemed to have grown perceptibly. She threw her schoolbag in back with the fruitcakes and meat scraps and hopped in front.

He apologized for being late; too much fun raking leaves, he said. She said she didn�t mind.

�So, what was the highlight of your day?� David asked. �Or were they all lowlights?�

�Oh, yeah, all pretty low,� she joked. �Oh, but in first period we watched a movie about the Reformation.�

They still could have fun together, joking offhand about nothing in stolen moments between appointments. In his mind, she had already anticipated her adulthood, but enjoyed her youth anyway, as if she was humoring it. Somwhere between them floated an unspoken inside joke. We know what this world is all about, but we�ll play along, it said. He tried to maintain a lighthearted air and enthusiasm about life that he didn�t always feel.

�Crazy old Martin Luther, eh?�

�Yep. He�s pretty crazy.�

She asked him to pick her up in half an hour. Not enough time to go home, so he decided to check out the old neighborhood. He drove up the row of quiet little homes of Springvale Road, the sun barely penetrating the overhanging maples, and turned by the house at the top of the hill, which had gone from yellow to white since he�d grown up in it. He turned right down the hill he�d descended in bikes, bigwheels and skateboards so many times as a child, around and down to the trail at the dead end.

It didn�t look like people went down there much any more. The path was congested with leaves that the neighbors left in a heap at the mouth of the woods. The trail now diverted to the left, where it met the street at the other end; few seemed to venture through the leaf piles to the stream. But he waded through the orange and yellow leaves, heaving them aside with each step. He imagined someone would shout at him to turn back, tell him he wasn�t allowed down there any more.

He saw that the water in the stream was stagnant; it waits for the spring thaw before it flows. Then, on seeing two boulders bordering the stream, he stopped. The one on the left, pointed, narrow, difficult to sit on. The one the right, rounded, rippled, a perfect throne for stream-watching. With one quick hop you could leap from one bank to the other.

They�re nothing special, he thought, any more than the moss-covered stump he had the faint impression of remembering, or the old drain pipe at the end that was the source of many a childhood expedition, or the roots that stuck out of the dirt to provide footholds for the children, were special. But seeing them all again somehow gave them weight; the fact that they had stayed here while he had moved on seemed important. He had forgotten the arrangement of the stones along the stream, but seeing them again gave him the impression of having stepped into a dream, where all those wisdoms and feelings of childhood could once again be revealed.

It wasn�t nostalgia, but simply a reckoning with the past. In his mind, his brother always took the rounded rock and left him to the crooked one. Sometimes he would try standing on a corner of his brother�s other rock, but it wasn�t quite big enough for the two of them. If only he could be where his brother was, he would be happier. He thought that way about a lot of things as a child, he realized. He almost laughed upon remembering the quiet frustrations of this imagined slight, which, though never spoken, had somehow grown large enough to remain in his head 15 years later.

Today he had the whole stream to himself. He stepped across � it didn�t even require a leap � and sat where his brother would perch, examining the waters below for fish that never came. He�d have to pick up his sister again from her piano lesson soon, but for a moment he could preside over the stream. For a moment it was the old stream, the edge of a childhood of adventures, an exotic place of strange plants and bugs. And then it was just the space between two dead ends, a leaf-covered path and a stream navigating two useless old stones with nobody to keep them company any more.

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