Slow on the Uptake
by Sydney Lea
At 60 — almost, Lord God, 20 years ago! — I took up the sport of flatwater kayak racing, my back and knees having started to protest too vigorously about my running through the woods to stay in shape. But the coronavirus shut down my paddle races in 2020.
Just as well. I’m talking about the races, Lord knows, not the virus. In middle June, I’d had an operation on my right hand, one designed to rectify a botched earlier carpal tunnel procedure. I was cautioned to treat my thumb and first two fingers delicately for six weeks, so I’d never have gotten in shape anyhow for the 12-miler scheduled for early August. But there’d be other races in other places.
Immediately after my first post-surgical workout on our beloved Maine lake, my wife took a picture of me. One of our granddaughters saw it and said, Look! Grandpa’s smiling! My face was contorted, but I wasn’t smiling.
I can dwell on doom sometimes, not blessings like the sweet child’s unique and beautiful smile. Like how on whitecap days such as that one the west wind striates the surface with parallel lines of foam. Like the half-grown eagle that struck the water’s surface twice, fishing its way to a tree, from which it now screamed.
I idled below the big raptor’s perch. I needed the break, though I lied to myself that I just wanted to check on its fortunes. They had been less than mine. I saw that I should feel privileged simply to be there, rocking side to side.
Tax your old muscles and bones like this, I told myself, every day if you can, as strenuously as you can. Extend your years as far as possible. But I was an old man now, and Mother Nature would remain undefeated. I’d be gone before long, the way new grass withers and dies — a notion from Scripture, which may mean nothing to you. That’s none of my business.
My die-hard spirit dies hard, but after that snapshot was taken, it struck me that a month without exercise would have weakened anyone, even a young man. As my mother used to say when stubbornness blinded me to my own ample advantages, You’re slow on the uptake, pal.
I felt I had little time — and all the time in the world. I could be here now, as one 60s icon advised after he went from Harvard professor Richard Alpert to aspirant Buddhist monk Baba Ram Dass. I was in my twenties then.
I remember the would-be monk’s father, a corporate lawyer, calling him “Baba Rum-Dumb.” Even then, I shared some of his cynicism, but staying in the present is a worthy aim. No, it won’t free the poor and oppressed in our time any more than in Ram Dass’s salad days and my own, for all our idealisms. Nor, to quote a song from that era, have we found the way we put an end to war. That’s a truth we’ve been confirming and reconfirming since humans started to farm and, in the process, conceived of property.
I still long to demolish injustice, but at my age it’s worth being diverted by what’s left of wonders — like that salmon, bright as a jeweler’s gem, 15 feet deep in the cove beneath the eagle’s perch, in water so clear I could look right through it, so pure I could drink it.
Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of his home state Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. (Past winners include luminaries from Galway Kinnell to Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Rudolf Serkin, and many others.) A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015). He is the author of 23 books, the latest Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life,” essays (Green Writers Press, 2021). The mock-epic graphic poem, “The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy“ (Able Muse, 2020), was produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka. Four Way Books (NYC) published Here, poems, in late 2019.