Gone fishin’

There’s a bar a few blocks from my office in New York called the Old Towne Tavern. It’s one of those long, dark places with high, pressed tin ceilings, deep booths, and a salt of the earth clientele. It’s been there forever.

Some years ago, a new restaurant opened down the block called “America”.  A fashionable place, it drew a fashionable crowd.  Readers of The New York Times Style section and Vanity Fair all, they wandered over from Gramercy Park and Park Avenue South, unfamiliar with the neighborhood.  More than a few of them stopped by the Old Towne looking for directions.

Before long, this wore on the bartenders, so they drew up a sign on a piece of cardboard and hung it in the window:

This is Ellis Island, it said.  America is down the street.

I mention this just to say that Northerners can have a sense of humor, too.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a boat at the mouth of the Little Alligator River on the Albemarle Sound, in North Carolina, dipping a line.  The fishing wasn’t too great, but the company was outstanding and the rain that was predicted mostly came in the off hours, leaving us unperturbed. There were thirteen of us, fraternity brothers from UNC, together in two little cabins sitting out on the water.  No electricity, outdoor plumbing, bunk beds. I had not seen many of these guys since college, more than 30 years, but we fell together like it was yesterday.

Amazingly, the weekend passed without anyone getting seriously hurt. This in spite of the presence of much beer, many knives, and a lot of fishing hooks. All of us being older and wiser, the rumor of a water moccasin under the sofa in the second cabin was left unconfirmed.  

There’s a saying: the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And it’s true. But there’s also place in time where present, past, and future converge, and that’s what we’re trying to locate now. Rekindling old friendships, starting new ones.  You can’t go home again because home’s not there, and you’ve changed, too.  So you build a new home, and you take it with you.

For me, going South is going home.  For Nora, it sometimes feels like  a trip to a foreign land.  But we know that as long as we do it together, it will work out fine.

Out on the Alligator, the last storm was due to hit on Sunday morning, about the time we were leaving, with clouds gathering over the causeway as we pulled back into the marina. A two-lane blacktop of possibilities lay before us heading west, a magic carpet made of asphalt.  Out there, the future was so bright, I had to reach for my shades.