I don’t know, but I sit myself down next to one and ask.
And then I listen.
And in the quiet, the water making almost no sound that I can detect, Stream answers:
We remember everything. As do you. Especially on the anniversary of that day, that year, when so much was lost, when it felt to you like the beginning of the end.
It is not the end. It was never the end. We keep flowing, even when it seems that we are dry, when you can see nothing but river rock, so many stones that add up to those lost.
You don’t have to know them, any of them, to feel their passing.
They have whooshed by you on the way out of their bodies into the stream— which is us, which is you, which is everything.
Take heart, as you do every day, in the flow, in the coming and going, even in the leaves,
which still look so green, which are beginning to silently turn, to begin the fall.
—
9/11/26 Rosh Hashanah
Monarch Glen seasonal stream, The Sea Ranch, Sonoma County, California / Photo: Dick Schmidt
As I set off on my morning walk, I think of a woman I know, older than I, beginning a pilgrimage 5,500 miles away across 100 kilometers of trail older than both of us, far older than this troubled country we call home.
What will she and her fellow pilgrims find on their way? Doesn’t the Earth scatter love letters on whatever paths we travel? In that fallen branch with maple leaves beginning to lose their summer green?
In the small feather tipped blue, melting into dove gray? In the spiky liquid amber balls, magnolia seedpods and fat oak galls? In pebbles on a dusty path in a land new to us?
I wish the pilgrims treasures of all kinds— not least the intangibles of new friendships, trust in the creative process and glimmers winking like mini Morse code, insight more felt than seen, absorbed into the bones.
From my footsteps to theirs, may wayfaring transform us in ways that may take years, perhaps, to recognize, far longer to understand—
we mere mortals, here so briefly, walking the sacred path that always circles back, the one that takes us—no matter how far afield we go—always in the direction of home.
•••
(for Melisa McCampbell and her fellow creative pilgrims led by Laura Davis, Brenda Porter and Andre Mallinger on the Camino de Santiago)
Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago / courtesy of Laura Davis, lauradavis.net
Jackie has her phone ready as Ryan nimbly hoists himself up onto a piling on the pier, a good ten feet above the water.
Balancing like a tightrope walker, he does not teeter and takes his first leap into the lake as she captures his twisting flip.
Jackie, a bikini’d college student, shoots video from the pier. Ryan, also in college, is a cheerful young man who seems not to be showing off so much as literally testing the water and delighting his friends.
We, old enough to be their grandparents, enjoy the show, one of us shooting stills, though also on a phone with the rapid-fire action of what used to be called a motor drive.
There is no motor, of course, no film, but, he’s still got it as I often tell this former newspaper photographer, who, more than half century ago, before motor drives, shot an exploding, bomb-filled railcar, timing it perfectly, just as the mushroom cloud reached its peak.
He now employs that same muscle as Ryan hurls himself backward, landing feet first in the cold blue of Lake Tahoe.
Ryan hollers as he surfaces the first time, stunned as most are by the fierce grip of Tahoe’s chill, but on subsequent leaps, his face pops up wearing a glittering smile, happy to jump again.
We cheer, and the old photographer— who in the long ago would have gotten an address to send the kids a print— airdrops one of his best digital images to Jackie.
She happily returns the favor by sharing her videos, reminding me why I spent more than three decades with college journalists and photographers, guiding them in placing their work in paper publications that could be held in the hands.
All that changed with time and technology, as things do.
What remains the same, however, are young people with a sense of kindliness toward older folks— as well as a taste for adventure, using the last of their summer vacations to make memories that, with luck, will last their lifetimes.
•••
With thanks to Ryan and Jackie for their good sport-ness in sharing a bit of their fun before they begin their new term at UC Santa Barbara.
(Top and above) Ryan leaps into Lake Tahoe / Photos: Dick Schmidt
This is not the time to tell you a story I have probably told you many times before, but I will do it anyway—
about your second day on the planet, almost 16 years ago, when your great-uncle and I came to visit your brand new self in the hospital.
There we beheld tiny you, your beautiful but exhausted mama and your bewildered father, who was charged with changing your diaper.
He shot me a stricken look, so, having once upon a time been pretty handy at such a task with my own niece and nephew, I guided your father through his first diaper change, both of us grinning and chuckling. It did not take him long to become a pro.
That was a baptism of sorts, though your daddy vanished from us far too soon. I’m sure his great heart was present today as you were welcomed into the church where he was baptized as a tiny boy and where four generations of your family have worshipped.
Today, as the wife of your first cousin once removed played “Holy, Holy, Holy” on your great grandmother‘s organ, I felt the presence of your ancestors, some of whom I knew, most of whom you did not, whoosh in on a wave of love.
They would not miss this. They would— as they always have been and always will— be here for you, as well as those of us gathered in the pews who will love you far beyond our earthly existences.
That, it turns out, is one of the greatest miracles of all, taught by a traveling teacher from Galilee some 2,000 years ago:
that love really is all there is, that love holds us always, that you, dear one, are beheld, cherished for all time by so many seen and unseen.
Standing over the open can on the driveway, its lid posing as a palette wearing a soppy brush ready for touching up,
I think of all the paint I’ve applied in my time to walls and boards, porches and chairs, though not nearly as much as some I’ve known.
And here comes my father carrying a can of light green paint for my little sister and me to apply to our playhouse, showing us how to lay it down real nice, my mother coming along after him to catch the runs, point out the sags, the “holidays” where we missed a spot.
And now the husband pops in, the one who teased me about the sissy pink I’d inadvertently chosen for the exterior, and, after painting half the house, insisting that it’ll be just fine—it’ll fade— you’ll see, Toots.
And it did, as will the bright purple now gracing the house next door— though I don’t want it to fade, any of it.
I want the bright beginnings, the shiny, the smell of possibility, to stave off the inevitable, to somehow wrangle the impossible into the attainable— more time with those holding the brush, making something old new again.
Güd wrtr 