summertime

Dozens of white boats rocked on the blue bay, their masts pointing at the cloudless sky like uneven pencils in a cup. Inside the yacht club a few hundred people who had loved Ken listened to eulogies about him over the music of clanking chains and wavelets slapping fiberglass. 

As different as the speakers and their connections to him were, they described exactly the same man, a testament to Ken’s lack of pretense and refusal to mask up. The speeches were what you hope for (but rarely get) — touching, sincere, often funny, all Ken-centric. One described how he had died at home, at his desk, and that when Beth went upstairs and looked in, he was sitting up straight with his eyes open, and she immediately thought he was pulling one of his famous pranks, pretending to be dead. The first thing she said to his too-pale face was “Is this a joke?”

Like a bomb going off, his death stunned our summer and its shock waves broke our voices, stuck in our throats. There were many versions of Where I Was When I Heard the News; it was clear that most of us were stuck in the finding-out phase and hadn’t yet replaced surprise with grief.

Three thousand miles east on that same Thursday, Simone skipped happily ahead of her mother into the cabin where she would stay for the next month with three other 10-year-old girls and a counselor. Out the window next to her bed she could see the rest of the compound: the shore of a navy-blue lake, a dock of silvered boards, pine and fir trees shading more cabins, other summer girl campers hugging and squealing hellos, their legs bared to the mosquitos, cheeks and noses pink in the sun. She was excited to swim first thing every day before breakfast, like last year, to get better at waterskiing, to see her old and new friends.

This July and August are the knife’s edge between Maine and California, elementary and middle school, childhood and what comes next. Her flats are beginning to round. She can tell the One Direction boys’ voices apart inside a song on the radio. Soon she will be running, not skipping, pounding uphill to the next challenge, away from us, from me. She grows more sure-footed as I begin to limp, stumble. I forget words faster than she learns them. She plumps as I shrivel. Life can’t happen fast enough for Simone, and I would trade everything I used to think mattered if it would slow down.

Back in San Francisco the next morning, as his daughter was showing some prospective campers and their parents around and singing the praises of canoeing and washing your hair in the lake, Chris was driving to work. His summers are busy and full of travel; he was cramming before a trip and had headed downtown in the very early light, catching the timed greens block after block on California Street. His small SUV was crossing Franklin; there was a burgundy blur; his instincts screamed “go left,” so he did.

Two seconds. Two cars had met and smashed, shoved and spun, air bags deployed. The crash was loud; the whump and shatter, the concussive bang was heard for blocks. The air around them burned with propellant and hot dust and fear. Chris got out of the car, thinking it was on fire, then got back in, then got out again. The man who had barreled through the red light owned up without excuse, said that he was sorry and completely at fault. Phone calls were made, and cops came and tow trucks, names and details keyed in; people stared from cars that crept by, looking for blood or bodies.

The two men stood in the smear of broken plastic parts and underbody dirt on the asphalt, looking at the ruined front of the Honda, buckled back to the windshield, and the destroyed side of the SUV. By reacting to the oncoming car, Chris had presented his VW’s flank to the impact. Just behind the center door post, where Simone was usually strapped into the right rear passenger seat, was a crater.

The sorry man had run out of words, and the necessities were nearly completed. Chris looked away from the bent metal and into the man’s eyes and said, “I’m really glad my daughter wasn’t with me.” The man, without hesitation, said, “I am too. And mine too.” Chris nodded.

And summer goes on, with its noise and heat, sun and sweat, its cool water to splash in, with laughter for some and tears for others, some expected and just as many not, same as always.