Friday night and most of Saturday morning, I read the essays my seniors wrote on the theme of separate worlds. Yet all weekend I could only think how impossibly connected these worlds we live in and move through are.
This morning Ann sat in a chair at a bend in the Russian River where as a girl our daughter's age (12), Ann herself fished and rowed down the river. This morning Whitman, fishing the same stretch of water, sat in the shade of a bridge that carries us over to the side of town where Ann's childhood past lives in memory and mind.
Those are the moments she remembers most vividly and cherishes: fishing, boating, playing at the river, camping with family. These are the moments she recalled over dinner last night in Jenner where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean.
Those are the moments we are trying to give our own children with a greater urgency as this senior year begins for Whitman, at the end of which he will pass from this life with us to the next one he will create for himself.
Thinking of the past as I listened to Ann speak of it there beside the river this morning, I could not help but recall Faulker's remark that "the past is not dead; it is not even past."
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