LIFE THREE MONTHS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

By Michelle Kearns

I started out by talking to a man who fell in love with another man. He lives down the road and around the bend from me and his name is Jack. Years ago he retired from his job at the college library and bought a canoe-sized sailboat.

Then his mate Bo got one for himself and together they rode back and forth across a little bay in Maine until Bo died. Now Jack sails alone with his black dog perched on the bow and that sight made me curious. For six years I wanted to write about him. But I was a newspaper reporter and I kept getting jobs to write about all the other nearby towns, not mine.

Then I went to graduate school, took a radio class and I could do stories about people anywhere. The day before the mad attackers flew into the trade towers, I sailed with Jack. He told me that with Bo gone, his books, his dog and his boat are his whole life. Cooking the vegetarian meals he used to make is too much trouble now so he says to hell with it and eats meat. He doesn’t visit other people and he’s gone back to being the recluse he was before he met Bo on a summer stock crew in 1959.

It has been a little funny how nearly every story I’ve done lately, started out about one thing and then turned out to have something to do with death. I’ve been dwelling on it since thousands died in those collapsing towers. I’ve listened to people who’ve been left behind after the ones they loved died and then I’ve put the sound of them talking into the computer, cut the sound into little pieces of the best parts of what they said and then moved the pieces around to make a story.

Getting stories is a little being a therapist. People tell you all kinds of personal stuff because they like having someone listen without talking back. I paid attention when the three people in my three radio stories told me what death does even though I’m the kind who avoids things that make me sad. I don’t go to sad movies. I don’t like sad books and I don’t like the grief I imagine when I think of someone I love dying. But maybe I need to get used to the idea – death happens to everyone eventually -- and these people were telling me how it works. And besides death makes good stories. After death, the stories of deep love get told. People say things that they don’t when the one they love is alive.

After Jack, I went to see Lucille who lives across the street from me because I had to have a class story with music in it and I’ve seen her sitting in a chair by a tree stump playing the harmonica as the cars go by. When I got there, Lucille wanted to talk about Roy more than she wanted to play. He was her husband and he loved to hear her. He died years ago of emphysema. Now she plays to soothe herself. Her fifteen harmonicas are like pacifiers. “You know you sit down, you calm down, you’re rested,” she said. “I have a lot of memories with that because I used to play with Roy before he passed away . . . You know when you’ve been married 53 years that’s a long time. And it’s kind of hard to shake it off, but I think I’ve done pretty good.”

Then she adds a word. Roughly. She’s done pretty good, roughly. Whenever she says, “Let’s go down and see Papa’s grave,” her big brown dog leads her to the cemetery beyond the garden bed and pond. Lucille has spells when she sits down and blows and draws on her harmonica until her dog howls and her cats run upstairs. “Put my little shoes away,” a sad song that sounds happy, is about a kid who is not doing too well and asks her mother to put her shoes away. And “You belong to my heart.” Roy used to love to hear that one, she said.

I did a little three-minute piece with music like the assignment said. But I’ve been wanting to go back to my main pile of music and talk and make a longer story because I didn’t have a chance to put in all the lovely bits. How she’s got a giant cedar that was just a little thing when Roy planted it. The tree is so wide now it hugs the corner of the house and keeps the place warm, she said. “You’d love Roy,” she said. “I just wish he hadn’t died.”

Even though she kept forgetting who I was, she told me to come back. Without someone around to talk to, her mind is getting a little loose.

That same day I went to see Jack again because I was going to need an eight-minute story and I thought there might be something more about him. I wanted to know why he said Montaigne was his favorite writer. It turns out that somewhere in the wandering old French essays, Montaigne wrote about how he felt like half a person when his best friend died. For Jack it’s the same.

Bo died suddenly of a heart attack and Jack says he was lucky because just the week before over breakfast, Bo said, “You know, I think we must be two of the luckiest people in the world. We’re both such oddballs, nobody else could have possibly gotten along with either one of us and yet we bumped into each other and here we are.”

That wasn’t the kind of thing they usually said to each other. Jack remembers his reply that morning and now he’s so glad he said what he said, “We’re going through a funny economic slump right now, but you know I’d rather be poor with you than rich with anybody else in the world.”

We walked to the grassy ridge where he let Bo’s ashes drop in the air by the little bay. They sailed together there. Jack sold his boat back to the boat builders and now he sails Bo’s. He and Bo picked out the name for it together: Mudlark, after a kind of English bird that runs along the water’s edge. He doesn’t like to say the word because it reminds him of how he misses Bo. “Catch-22,” a play on ketch, the nautical word for a two-masted sailboat, is the fake-boat name he gives strangers.

They’re the ones he makes friends with by walking through the nearby campground with Barnaby, who has a habit of running into people’s tents and grabbing their wallets or underwear or socks. That’s how he met a Dutch woman who was camping by the seashore with her husband who was losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. Jack decided to invite her to sail with him in Mudlark even though he doesn’t take passengers and he’s pretty serious about being a recluse.

He says he won’t go visiting and he doesn’t invite people inside his small gray-shingled house. Mad maybe at Bo being gone, or he thinks he’s too much of an oddball for other people to like him as much as Bo did.

Sooner or later everyone’s going to be an orphan. That’s what Jim the clam digger says. I went to talk to him because I thought the odd way he digs clams by putting on a wetsuit and picking them as he kneels in a saltwater lake would make a good ten-minute documentary. He lives the next town over from Jack and Lucille and Jim misses his wife, his father and his mother. They’re all dead. Without them, he has vacancies inside.

They don’t get filled, he said as he reached into the water. When he was a little boy, he used to pluck hard-shells like these with his mother. He thinks about her out here. He finally mastered her piecrust. It took him years to figure out the extra shortening she added was a third of a cup. He wishes she was still around so he could tell her.

The free-no-boss life of a clam digger is a luxury and he learned it from her.

Now he says he lives in Jimland where he makes the rules. His life goes on, but there’s an indent where his mother used to be. “You know what I mean?” he said. I do I guess. Death is different for everybody. The harmonica player was losing her mind. The strangers who meet Jack the sailor love his jokes and his dog and his boat, but he won’t share himself any more than a dog-walking conversation will allow. He feels safer at a distance.

And then there’s the clam digger and he’s happy. His mother died of kidney failure five years ago at 82 when he was ready and so was she. There’s no way to know if I’ll get lucky like that.