Notes on a Second Act -- by Benjamin Church Smith

See this story in its original context in The Hometown Issue, September 2009

In a small clearing in the trees two young girls play on a smooth, wide rock, over which a small waterfall flows down onto the beach. They spot me as I pass, transfixed by an unexpected intrusion on their idyllic summertime meanderings. The older of the two wears a green one-piece bathing suit and the younger---young enough to be almost un-gendered---is dressed only in her cotton underwear. They notice me and stare, deer frozen in the chaotic moment of fear and wonder brought on by the intrusion of the external world. It could have been an old romantic painting—these children of innocence, so close to the playfulness or birds learning to fly from the nest or a doe taking its first cautious clumsy steps.

My gaze is an invasive presence---a threat to their youthful summertime dream---and the girls disappear up the stony ascent without a word. I walk on, my mind drifting from the image of their improvisational play and onto thoughts of my own childhood explorations along this very beach with my sister. We found our way here every summer day that we could---wandering idly through humid afternoons, examining the refuse of shipwrecked lobster pots and decaying sea life.

I am back in my hometown. (Little Compton, Rhode Island. Population: 3,514.)

Oh! But it made me the man that I am today!

Often I wish that it had---that I had married a hometown girl and now spent my afternoons walking our dogs along the shore---discussing the year’s peculiar weather patterns and trading bits of insubstantial provincial gossip with passing neighbors. But this is not the way we grow. We turn restless, in need of some ambiguous concept of progress toward which our prideful minds strive. And then one day we return, to see the beauty of our origins, the humble reality of one of life’s infinite choices, a door now closed by the gatekeeper Time.

At least there is always that well, its iconic image fixed in my mind. It sits in solitude on the open grass beside a long dirt road, overlooking the ocean. Jamie reversed his rusty old Buick into a dirt pile there. The tailpipe filled with soil and the engine wouldn’t start. We were a carful of aimless teenagers, stopping to wander along the shore and stare out at the sea. My father also took me there on meandering weekend drives. Afterward we would visit the graveyard in the center of town where, in the morning shadows of the church’s tall white steeple, much of the history of England’s colonial ambitions are engraved in tablets that centuries later offer little more than death’s reminder.

My namesake is buried there, certainly the town’s most famous grave. Many have come and gone from this small coastal settlement over the years, but here I am---Benjamin Church---generations on, wandering through the sands of the very same shore.

He was a man who, whatever the moral remainder, brought together Englishmen and Native tribes in the bloody land grab of New England’s newly colonized coast. He is remembered about as fondly as any man of that era was---reportedly fair to both Native Americans and settlers (though I am fully aware of who writes those histories). He was a renegade and a war hero who, after his triumphs were through, widened considerably and required the assistance of two men to help him trudge slowly across the land that he had once spent such immense energy to protect. Obese and listless, he died in the grips of historical metaphor, falling fatally from his horse.

Is he part of me? Does the blood of generations truly flow through related bodies; is the past of the Father truly cast onto the son? Could the residue of his identity be infused with my own---genes, those strongest of family heirlooms, unwittingly passed down through generations? Did I inherit his tragedy and triumph or will I someday find, humbled by years long past, that his famed history was a product, not of genetic fate, but of circumstance alone?

What can a man be now? A plumber? A computer programmer? A hedge fund manager? At best a well-paid cog in the circular machinery of America’s well-oiled industrial engine. What can a woman be? At best and worst the same? Who are today’s explorers?

Well, perhaps at home you can dream. Perhaps you can reclaim the exploration of small mystery that is second nature for the young.

I want to be back at the well. Let my profession be the small gesture of beauty that lays its foundation in the mind of a child as he wanders attentively, hoping to construct meaning out of a world in which there is, truly, no purpose. Know this and bask in its melancholy liberation: You have no purpose.

Purpose or not, there is still the well and the car and the dirt and the Father and everything that will stick with you forever, like it or not. There is the distance and the disillusionment and the disappointment and everything that you will find when you return.

I cannot tell you how sad I am that we grow old. That our roots spread wide, are cut, multiply. That soon we cannot recognize the bark that has chipped away and dried on the ground, wilting in the shade of a trunk that has lost sight of its own soaring leaves.

I stayed up so many nights and thought about these things. I watched the leaves of the maple tree blow in the yard because I could never sleep. It had been a sapling when I, too, was just a child and from my window I watched it grow tall. When I moved away storms came and fractured its massive trunk---splitting it to the base and tearing out the roots.

How did it get this way? I was a created out of a moment of sex between my parents, a simple collision of sperm and egg in a small corner of the vast useless universe and now I weep at the site of a dead crab flipped onto its back on a rocky New England beach.

I shiver to watch the hummingbird hover, drawn to the sweet red syrup of its feeder.

I seethe at the manipulation of humble lives by the hubris of a myopic nation.

I was a baby so large---ten pounds, four ounces---that they had to cut me out to bring me into the world. Perhaps I was reluctant. Perhaps I am still.

You know: you never wanted anything at all, but now he asks you---tie loosened for the after-work drink---to discuss the Health of the Economy, the Argument for a Strong National Defense and the best way to update the Tax Code. Don’t trust him. He is a child who forgot the sensation of placing the first foot down into the shining green morning dew settled upon freshly mown grass. He has learned to fear the mystery of salt water. He will tell you, above all else, to get with the program. Don’t trust him. Do you know what that program is?

This little piggy got fat. This little piggy went bald. This little piggy became an alcoholic. This little piggy became a bore. And they all went to therapy.

Those girls skittering away across the slippery slate of the lazy waterfall---they are the truth that is worth telling. They are the haiku and the novel. They are the symphony and the folk song. They are the quiet wind that blows fog through the trees.

I found a ladybug crawling across the forest green wall of my bedroom at night. Where was she headed? How did she spend her time? When I awoke she had fallen into a glass of water that I had left by my bedside because I drank too much beer. Her wandering was over and I had a headache.

How do you spend your time?

I watch The Jetsons on rerun at eleven and later try to stand up on my boogie board in the brown-brackish water of the creek.

I stumble through the garden---grasping at ripe pea-pods, trying my best to read a book.

I hide beneath the trees for as long as I can---watching closely for another snake, hoping it won’t bite.

I have a brand new shirt to start the year off right. Walk me to the bus stop and take my picture. See how long it lasts.

I watch the man across the street that everyone calls crazy, thinking, He is just a man. He thinks I am my father. He is not like us. Can he see beyond time?

You’ve got worries? Me too. I know some kid who can get us vodka. Let’s go out to the beach and wander through the stars.

It’s dark and I can feel the liquor---take off your clothes and we’ll run naked into the ocean. All these summers and I am still afraid of the blue crabs---I worry they will pinch my feet.

I went broke---spent all my time trying to recreate the sound of your lonely whispers, wanting to always feel like July.

I’m seventeen forever. I want to fall in love the way they do on TV. Uncontrollable.

Should I stay home and settle in the sky’s quiet embrace?

We are always arriving.