Life Surprises Read online

  I realized that we were losing the battle. “I’m Angela, Honey. I’m your granddaughter.” I started to cry because I no longer knew what to say. He rambled on for awhile, mumbling about the woman who had come to see him.

  I finally realized that, for him, Emily would always be the little girl in the blue bathing suit. That reality had nothing to do with a real person who grew up and changed. In his mind, she was a changeless, eternal little innocent, holding his feather and transforming his life with her mystic presence. He could not reconcile the real person with the myth.

  I went back the next day, but he was past talking. He lay with his head on the pillow, looking at me with a shadow of recognition, smiling at what I said, but no longer able to respond. His right hand was curled up onto his chest, and in that hand he held the photo of his Angel. The feather lay on the bed alongside him.

  He died a couple of days later. Emily was invited to the funeral but said it would be too painful. She didn’t go into detail but I knew what she was feeling. Her myth revolved around a tall, healthy stranger who could walk and speak, not a wasted old body lying in a casket. The effort to find him had been a success, but the reality could never begin to displace the myth. Yet, without the search, he would never have been able to see the photo of his little red-headed girl in those last days of his life. That picture became the final treasure of his 84 years.

  I spoke at the funeral. I told the story one last time and marveled with the mourners how one tiny act of kindness had been able to transform two lives and affect dozens of others. G-pa had spent more than two decades mining the riches of love and faith that followed from that chance encounter. He had shown all of us the abiding value that can be found in the tiniest events of life.

  II

  Memories

  When Sean Milling was about nine, his parents enrolled him in a class for children at a local swim club, and he quickly showed signs that he might have the potential to become a competitive swimmer. Some of his friends were in the class and they loved taking the lessons together. But the best part of the session came at the end. The instructors paired those who were qualified and had them race each other across the width of the pool. Those who lost were eliminated, and the pairings continued in tourney form until one person was declared the winner for that night.

  There were about forty kids in the class, of whom half were competent to take part in the races. It was the final event of each swim session, and the boys all talked about it eagerly, boasting about who they were going to beat this time. On the night of the third class session, Sean won. And he won almost every night after that for the remainder of the year. The coaches were soon making greater plans for him, and the other boys were gunning for his title and reputation.

  The notoriety was an important factor in Sean’s life. He was a little shorter than the rest of the boys going into fifth grade and, although he was a good student, he had a tendency to, shall we say, embellish the truth about himself to compensate for his short stature. He was so good at bragging about his exploits, however, that his friends swallowed at least half of his stories. And he had become skilled at producing evidence to prove his claims, so that the boys who admired him eagerly shared his stories with each other. In short, he already had a reputation for superior skills, so that his successes in the pool seemed to confirm the rest of his claims.

  One of those claims involved a boy’s camp in upper New York State which he had attended the previous summer. Although it was a regular summer camp, he let it be known that it had been a sort of farm team training camp for young boys who one day hoped to play for the New York Yankees. When he told his friends that he had been named MVP for the summer, they didn’t believe him. But then he brought to school a very impressive plaque, claiming to have been awarded it at the end of the summer. It had his name, Sean Milling, prominently displayed above the legend, “Most Valuable Player, New York Yankees Youth Training Camp, 1989,” and it was apparently signed by Dallas Green, Yankees’ General Manager. What he failed to tell his friends was that he had paid to have the plaque made, using money he earned on his paper route.

  At the end of the school year, in the summer of 1990 when Sean was almost ten years old, his family took one of their rare vacations. Someone had loaned them the use of a cottage on Silver Lake in the Adirondacks, and they drove there on a Saturday afternoon, planning to enjoy a week of swimming, boating and outdoor fun. It was a beautiful location with wide sandy beaches and low, pine-covered mountains. As soon as they got settled in the cottage, Sam, Sean’s father, suggested that they go for their first swim. He said, “Sean, you’re going to love swimming in the lake. It’s a whole different experience from the pool at the swim club.”

  Sean had never been to a lake before, and was already wondering how far he could swim in open water. He also wondered if they could organize some competitive events between the other vacationers along the shore.

  Sean and his older sister, Anita, changed into their bathing suits and walked down to the beach. He called to his father, “Hurry up. I want to swim with you.” His mother, standing on the front porch of the cottage, gave a derisive laugh. Sean heard her say, “That’ll be the day!”

  He frowned and took a few steps toward her. “Isn’t Daddy coming?”

  His father came out onto the porch just as his mother said with amusement, “Your father can’t swim. He’s afraid of the water!”

  Sean was shocked. Could this be possible? His father, putting one arm around his wife’s back to quiet her, called out, “You go on and have fun with Anita. I’ll watch you from here.” Bewildered, Sean turned and started for the water. He had never known this about his father, and wondered why he would come to the lake if he was afraid of the water.

  Anita had run ahead and was splashing in the clear water, screaming when she realized how cold it was. But, as Sean approached the water’s edge, something came over him. It was as though someone had poured lead into his head and it rapidly filled his body, building in weight and pressure until it burst out the top of his head. It was dread. He had never before experienced dread, and it paralyzed him.

  His legs turned to rubber and he collapsed on the sand a foot from the edge of the lake. His father, watching Anita jumping about in joy, at first was unaware of what had happened to Sean. When he saw him sitting huddled on the beach, he called, “Go on in, Sean. The water’s fine! I want to see you swim in it.”

  When Sean didn’t move, Sam stepped down off the porch, walked towards the lake and reached out a hand to grab Sean’s shoulder. At that point, the boy burst into terrified screams, crying hysterically and digging his fingers into the sand as though to anchor himself so he couldn’t be moved.

  Sam, shocked by this unexpected behavior, knelt by him and asked what was wrong. Sean’s chest hurt so much from the racking sobs that he could hardly breathe, much less talk. His father kept pressing him for an explanation, demanding that he calm down, but there was no reasoning with him. Sean was so hysterical that he couldn’t even walk, which meant that his father had to pick him up and carry him back to the cottage where he spent the rest of the afternoon in bed.

  That night he had the dream for the first time.

  It was the vividness of the dream that got his attention, perhaps because he had nothing to compare it with. He seemed to be an observer watching the action take place, while at the same time looking out through the eyes of the young boy.

  The symbolism was so clear that the dream seemed to be demanding that he recognize the setting. He wore a workman’s cap with a bill, a long black woolen coat and wooden clogs, and in the background was a windmill surrounded by masses of tulips. He realized instantly that he was a young Dutch boy.

  In the dream, he was walking along a road which ran by a lake, carrying a large basket made of woven reeds. In the basket was a dead, plucked goose, its head hanging over the basket’s edge and swinging with every step. The boy looked to be about Sean’s age, ten or slightly older, and he was whist
ling as he went.

  Through the odd intuitive knowledge by which dreams provide their own captions, he knew that he had just spent a major part of the family’s meager funds on the goose, which was to be the main course for a special 70th birthday dinner celebration for his grandfather.

  Sean, or rather, the Dutch boy, had been chosen to run this important errand since everyone else was busy either working or preparing dinner, and he was the only one who could be spared. His mother had grabbed him by the coat collar as he left, and had sternly reminded him of the importance of his mission. Without the goose, his family would not eat, and the money with which he was being entrusted was a small fortune to a family which had almost nothing. He had promised to be careful.

  As he walked along the road, which was separated from the edge of the lake by only a few feet, three teenage boys on bicycles came along from behind him. They passed him single file, and the first one grabbed the cap off Sean’s head and threw it into the water. As he turned to see where his cap had landed, one of the other boys put his foot in the middle of Sean’s back and gave him a shove, so that he went flying. His arms flailed out in front of him, the basket launched itself out of his hands, and both basket and goose landed in the water.

  Crying out in alarm, he dropped to his belly and peered over the edge of the embankment. The water was covered with an interwoven mass of the large green leaves of water plants, and the basket lay on top of them, upside down and partly submerged. He could just reach it over the foot-high drop-off to the water’s surface. But when he retrieved the basket, the goose was gone.

  Horrified, he leaned back over the edge and tried to reach down into the water through the tough, scratchy leaves. Not being able to reach the bottom from that position, he sat up and, without taking off his clogs, stuck his feet into the water to try to locate the bird. However, because he had removed the basket, he had no clear idea where the goose might have fallen. Finally, with increasing alarm, he jumped down into the water and felt around with his hands. Success! He found the bird, grabbed it by its slimy neck, and threw it up on the bank. But when he turned to climb out of the water, the muck on the bottom of the lake sucked off his clogs, leaving him barefoot.

  Since he had no desire to walk home along the stony road without clogs, and knowing that he would be soundly thrashed if he told his father he had lost his shoes, he reached back down into the water hoping to find them quickly. However, while the fat goose had been easy to locate, his clogs were stuck in deep muck at the bottom of the lake, and his arms were too short to reach that far.

  Since all Dutch boys knew how to swim, he had no problem ducking under the surface. He took a deep breath and went down on his hands and knees between the tangle of stems and leaves that crowded the water. He felt around in the soft muck but found nothing. Widening the area of his search, he unwittingly moved out into deeper water. When he tried to stand up to take another breath, a number of things – disorientation, his water-logged overcoat, the tangle of plant stems trapping his arms, his inability to find a firm footing – all combined to defeat him. In his struggles, he sucked in a lungful of water, panicked, and was instantly free of the water.

  Except that now he was above the water! He was looking down on the riverbank where he could see his basket and the goose lying in a grotesque position. But he himself was nowhere to be seen.

  The dream scared Sean so badly that he woke up gasping for breath. His crying attracted his mother who did her best to soothe him. “There, there, you just had a bad dream. Now think of something nice, and lie down and go back to sleep.”

  But the images kept swimming through his head, and they almost succeeded in recreating the dread that he had felt earlier that day when he had tried to go swimming. He finally fell back to sleep, and the next morning forgot about the experience. It was a Sunday so they all went to church and, because of the strict Sabbatarian beliefs of his parents, they were not allowed to go swimming. So he was spared having to deal with that strange fear of the water which he had so unexpectedly experienced the day before.

  They walked partway around the lake and later sat on the beach, enjoying the June weather. Anita and he built sand castles and dug holes at the shoreline, read and played board games in the cottage. Television was another thing not permitted on Sundays.

  That night he went to bed as usual, tired, sleepy, and without any particular worries. But again at about two a.m., he had the same dream in even more vivid detail. He seemed to know what was going to happen when the boys came along on their bicycles, but he was powerless to move out of their way. As he plunged into the water looking for his clogs, the water plants became like a rope mesh, grasping him, binding his hands, trussing him up like his dead goose. He felt the searing pain in his chest as his body screamed for air, and the suffocating sensation of water entering his mouth and lungs.

  And then he was above the lake once again, free, calm, without pain or anxiety. He looked down on the basket and goose lying on the bank, and felt oddly detached from them. In one corner of his mind, the thought lingered for a moment – “My mother is going to be disappointed when I don’t bring the goose home.” But that part of his life seemed far away and unimportant, almost as though the people were part of someone else’s family. And then he was awake.

  He couldn’t decide how to react. The end of the dream had actually had a calming effect on him, but then he remembered the feeling of smothering, causing the frightening sensations to return with a jolt. He started to cry loudly, and his mother hurried in for a second time, a little less patient than the night before. He said, “I had the same dream and it felt like I was drowning again.”

  She sat on the bed, smoothed his hair and said, “Well, it was only a dream. It can’t hurt you. It’s all in your head.” Then getting a little more serious, she added, “I don’t know why you dream about being afraid of the water. You’re a wonderful swimmer. You’re not going to drown. If you fell into the water, you’d know what to do.” She waited a moment. “Isn’t that right?”

  He nodded reluctantly. “But,” he protested, “why do I dream about drowning if I can swim? And why am I a Dutch boy?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” she said. “Dreams are funny things. Go back to sleep, and have pleasant dreams for a change.”

  As she left, he asked her, “Why is Daddy afraid of the water?”

  She turned with an impatient look on her face, and said, “I don’t know. He always has been.”

  “You don’t make him go in the lake.”

  “You’re not like him, Sean. That’s why I sent you to take swimming lessons. I don’t want you to be afraid of the water like he is. Now go to sleep and don’t worry about these things.”

  The next day, they rented a small motorboat in the morning and drove all around Silver Lake. They stopped for lunch at a little café on a pier where they ate foot-long hotdogs, the first ones Sean had ever seen. There was a small playground at another spot across the lake, and their parents paid the fee so that Anita and he could play on the equipment. The main attraction was a child’s roller coaster, tiny cars that accommodated two people and traveled on tubular steel rails up and down slight inclines. Anita rode in back, her arms protectively around her brother, and they liked it so much that they rode it three times.

  They got back to the cottage after two o’clock, and Sam announced that it was time to go swimming. Sean put on his swimsuit with some misgivings, but was determined to go in the water this time. However, as he got to the water’s edge, it happened again. It was like he hit a brick wall. He was powerless to go any farther. It was as though he had lost control of his body. He could not take that final step into the water.

  Sam came down from the cottage and said, with some displeasure, “Sean, don’t do this again. We’re here at the lake to have a nice week and do some swimming. You’re a good swimmer. Why are you refusing to go in?”

  Sean was disgusted with himself, frightened at this strange feeling, and upset at his f
ather’s insistence. “How come it’s OK for you to be afraid of the water, and not me?”

  His father was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t know why I’m afraid. I have been all my life. I’ve missed a lot of fun because I couldn’t go in the water. I don’t want you to be like me. And you’re not. You’re a good swimmer. I’m very proud of you. So why not just go in and have fun?”

  Sean thought for a while. “How do you feel when you try to go in the water?”

  Sam looked at him, trying to collect his thoughts, and said, “My knees get weak, my stomach wants to throw up, and I feel like I’m going to faint.”

  “That’s just how I feel,” said Sean angrily. “Why do you force me to go in when you don’t have to do it yourself?”

  Sam sat down alongside of Sean. “You’re right. I don’t know why you’re afraid of the lake, but at least you can swim at the club. Maybe it has something to do with the size of the lake.”

  All Sean could say was, “I can’t help it.” He sat on the beach in a miserable funk and dug angry holes in the sand, watching a dozen people from the area having a good time romping in the water.

  When they got back to the cottage, everybody was upset with him, especially Anita who complained, “I don’t have anybody to swim with.” He tried to make it clear that he couldn’t help himself, that his body wouldn’t let him go in, but his mother wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense. “You’ll just have to try harder. I won’t have this defiant attitude!”

  Well, it was one thing for her to tell him to behave differently, and quite another for him to tell his body to behave differently. But she made him promise to try. He went to bed not thinking about dreaming but about how he could overcome his nervous reaction, or whatever it was, and get into the water tomorrow.