I am writing this on my iPad on the side of a warm therapy pool—more like a giant whirlpool—while I am defrosting my legs. It gets cold up here in the Berkshires. It didn’t get out of the single digits today and it will go back down into the double minus digits tonight. Yet Florida-born Millie, for reasons only God can fathom, revels in this kind of arctic algidity.
It’s the one thing I know she prays for besides food. She likes to flop down outside for a nap and is soon quite content to be fully enveloped in her ice cocoon. I have never seen her whine or come in.
Perhaps I felt challenged by the dry cold and the warm happy Golden. I put on my heaviest performance gear. But I thought I’d be fine wearing shorts… good strong performance shorts. My legs rarely get cold and we weren’t doing any real climbing, not in this snowpack. I had great boots, socks and a hat. In Michigan, where I grew up, we kids wore shorts on winter days just to show what he-men we were.
The upward trail we chose was fine, not much wind. When we got to the top we discovered an abandoned summer sports camp. Millie tore off in search of orphaned balls. I tore off after Millie, suddenly realizing that my legs were not so impervious after all to the wind building across the open plain. I turned down the trail and ran. Millie followed. In no time I had her back at the house and I was headed for the South Berkshire community center with my eye on their blistering hot sauna and warm therapy pool with the powerful jets.
I was not the only one in the pool. There were a couple of very nice young women who were in charge of a small gaggle of mentally disabled adults, men who were just a few years younger than my own Down syndrome brother would have been had he not walked off toward a frozen Michigan horizon many, many years before, never to be seen alive again, his body found after the spring thaw floating in a lake where every single investigator swore it would not be.
The date. Suddenly I thought of the date. It was today, all those years ago, my brother Bobby vanished. That he just seemed to walk off the planet. And here I was floating in a pool with men who could almost have been his schoolmates at St. Barbara’s.
I floated for a while, my legs defrosting, wondering if this meant anything, anything at all. Was it randomness my brain was trying to organize into some pattern that made sense to me? Or was it something more, the interconnectedness of reality and history and soul?
We all floated for a while. And the more I floated, the less I thought and the more I felt.
