Silver

Won’t your hand
Find my hand
In the watery grave
Of the moon?
When the silver
That drifts
Along the sliver
That lives
Between the light
Of stars
And the ink of night
Alights upon
Leaf-tips;
Sleeping barbicans
In the flicker
Of long-gone autumns?
When the combines
Swarm along state routes,
And their reflections
And their shimmerings
Quiver in the wind
As we pass in the silence —
That Silence.
Among trees;
Among ruined bridges;
Among rail-spans, spillways, and lift-bridges;
Among the shadowed spans of doorways
Awash in the last
Innocent Christmas
You remember;
In the ash that leaves my lips
And settles on my sleeve
As we traverse each distance.
You lean in close,
As the road descends
In its grace
From blacktop, to gravel,
To grass.
You have found a secret; that secret:
An ending — here —
The beautiful ending of lights —
In a world that never once
Deserved those lights,
Or the finding of those lights.
We move together, then:
Beneath, among, above
These horizons that
Have held us to the earth,
And we are free:
As free as
Every silver thing.

It was not all a dream.

My parents recently concluded what can only be called a terrible real estate transaction that began with discussions about the changing economic profile of their neighborhood, the realities of yard upkeep, and proximity to grandchildren ... and concluded with curses issued to our federal government, a brush with financial fraud, and several episodes of yours truly brandishing a glass of straight gin on ice cursing under his breath very late at night. All of this over five months, in the worst real estate market this country has seen since the Great Depression. It's an interesting story, but not meant for this space.

Back in 1976, I was as much of a mess as one 7-year-old boy could be: I was at the top of my form in good old Riverdale, Illinois, in my quaint track-side school that went from kindergarten to third grade: I was the fastest, the strongest, the funniest, and -- I thought -- the smartest in all of Park School. (Ah ... big fish in little ponds.) And then my world went upside-down. When I first caught the scent of the possibility that my parents were considering pulling up roots and moving elsewhere, I was indignant: This was not possible. What motivation could explain this absurdity? Here, all was well: I was within walking distance of my school, my grandmother lived in the "apartment" upstairs, my great-grandma Torrenga lived a mere two blocks away, my best friend's grandmother lived right next door (affording me access to said best friend upon his frequent visits), and all was right with God and his universe. Of course, my seven-year-old brain failed to recognize details such as the gang- and riot-riddled high school my sister and I were destined to attend based upon our address, or the fact that our parents were forced to sleep on a fold-out hide-a-bed so that my sister and I could have separate rooms.

And so we landed in South Holland. I remember how terribly conflicted I felt the first time I stepped foot on the property: Here was a foreign land, a virtual desert expanse of suburbia compared to our near-Chicago bungalow jungle in Riverdale. Here, few backyards had fences; the railroad passed right behind the house -- and there were four sets of tracks! The block offered no less than four neighbor boys -- boys! -- to play with as opposed to the oddly imbalanced overabundance of girls to be found on our Riverdale block. It seemed oddly rural compared to our Riverdale address: there was something sad and lonely about the evenings here, and the dark seemed darker and the night more deep. The school wasn't a simple kindergarten to third-grade affair: No, it was kindergarten straight up to sixth grade. It seemed like a college campus to me, where I was at the bottom of the seniority list.

But, my vote was a small one weighed against our circumstances, and we took the move. I think back on it now, and I feel bad for my parents: The grief I must have caused them. My oldest son cries whenever we cart an old piece of furniture or a decrepit appliance to the curb, he's that sentimental: "But I LOVE our old water softener!" he sobs; "But I love that washing machine." My heart aches for him, but I'm exasperated: Life finds innumerable ways to explain to us the grief we've unknowingly caused others, no? But I digress.

The day we went to our soon-to-be-new house, I was nervous, but excited. There was a basement stairway, with grapevines growing upon the railing. (With real grapes! That you could eat!) There were, of course, the rail lines, with their regular schedule of house-shaking freights. There were dirt bike trails and their attending dirt bikes -- soon to become the nemesis of my father. There were the string of backyards that would become a convenient baseball diamond/football field/battlefield/graveyard. And there were paintings, left by the previous owners, of naked ladies in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Wow! (These were seen once, and never again.)

So we bought our house on Prince Drive in South Holland. We settled in, we made a life, we grew up. It was a good place to grow up -- the right balance of comfort and toughness that a kid needs to learn his way. There were the crazy kids, and the good kids, and the bad kids, just like every other neighborhood. In the summers, we would spend too much time with each other, get bored, get into fist-fights, storm off, and realize that we were the only game in town, and learn to negotiate peace. My poor father -- forever pining for a return to his pure rural roots -- found ample space for a large garden; my mother, a daughter of Chicago, found herself on familiar ground. It was as close to a perfect compromise as the family would ever find.

I don't know what you can say about a home, except that you know what makes it a home while it is yours, and whatever that is can never be truly expressed to anyone else. Thinking back, I have glimpses: Of hot summer afternoons spent swigging cold Coca-Cola from glass bottles beneath the mock-orange tree in the backyard while the freight trains rocketed by; of snow-days and blizzards spent too-long in the backyard making snow forts until runny noses chased us indoors to hot chocolate and Spiderman cartoons. It was a good house, a good home.

My parents stayed as long as they could. Things were getting to a place where I was uncomfortable letting Liz and the kids travel there on their own. It's just one of those things. The church was gone; most of our friends and family were gone. My best friend and I were robbed at gunpoint two blocks away one Christmas: "Throw your wallets on the ground, and there better be money there or you're both fuckin' dead!" There you go. Welcome home. It was time. Dad had to give up a glorious yard, hard-fought-for and hard-won; Mom had to give up the home she'd tweaked to her tastes over three decades. And, for me, on that last day -- as the moving vans closed their doors, and I backed out of that driveway for the last time -- I couldn't resist one last circuit around the old sights. The thing is, I realized fairly quickly that I'd become a relic; a stranger among my old haunts.

My parents are blessed to have a wonderful home in a wonderful neighborhood, not more than 10 minutes from where I live. Our kids are silly with excitement, apparently because they have a new house to explore, but clearly because their beloved grandma and grandpa are now only 10 minutes away instead of 45 minutes. My father has lost a wonderful backyard, but gained an entire neighborhood that is safe to walk around in, day or night. It's taken me a long time to get that life is nothing more than a series of chapters that conclude and subsequently serve as the prologue to the next, and that this isn't a bad thing, or even a sad thing, just a true thing.