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calls itShangri-La, a charming place to lay his head, if you ignore the intermittent thuds of beaks hitting glass. The first time I witnessed a bird’s


fatal miscalculation, I was working on my laptop at the dining room table. I slid open the glass door and crept toward the stunned chickadee. The crown of its scalp was bloodied, eyes vacant. I watched the bird take its last puzzled breaths before its body went stiff. I buried it in the woods later that day.


A BAD OMEN? I told my mom about the bird that had just flown into the window. “There’s an old wives’ tale about


that,” she said, her voice shaky. “It means death is near.” The timing was synchronous. I was


about to visit a cemetery, and in a few weeks I was planning to ride my motorcycle from New Hampshire to Southern California, taking a 4,300- mile route through the Deep South. I fancy myself a man of reason, not given to supernatural explanations for phenomena, but with a trip of such magnitude ahead of me, I could have done without the omen. My mom offered to visit the cemetery with me, but I insisted I go alone.


//MY DAD’S CHALET IS HIS OWN MONASTERY.


IT’S BURIED IN THE WOODS, TUCKED ALONGSIDE A STREAM OVERLOOKING A POND.//


MY GRANDMOTHER The graveyard was less than a mile from where my grandmother had lived most of her life. I had spent summers there as a child, tinkering with tools in the backyard, among the rhythmic chirping of chickadees in the birch trees. Inside her house, I would sprawl out on the living room floor and send GI Joes on black-ops missions. Beside my play area was a cabinet full of decorative hummingbirds, which Anne collected. Every day, she would watchThe Price is Rightwhile making progress on a puzzle. In the afternoon, she would nap on the couch and ‘rest her eyes.’ The visits were escapes from the vortex of divorce. She died when I was seventeen, freezing those summer days in mental stasis.


LIFE IS SHORT There are many reasons for visiting a grave. Since I was moving across the country, perhaps I was visiting her grave to say goodbye. Maybe I wanted to tie up a loose end. I hoped it wasn’t just a project. It was likely a result of my stay with


my dad, who is acutely aware of the brevity of this ride we call life. During the six weeks I lived with him before I left for California, he discussed a fatal diagnosis or mortal accident nearly every day. “An old teacher of yours was


diagnosed with brain cancer,” he would inform me during a commercial break while we watched the news. “A friend of mine is fighting for his life after a motorcycle accident,” he might say before he left for a ride of his own. Fixating on death is Greg’s way of


illustrating his most cherished saying, cliché as it may be: life is short. Such insights usually come in the stillness of early morning, around 3-4am, as he plans his workday over coffee. As I slept in the spare bedroom, he would scribble reminders of life’s shortness on scrap paper. I thought of these notes as letters – morning prayers, affirmations for his oldest son. Some of these letters concerned


mundane tasks. “Pick up some eggs, please,” or “Clean the stove after cooking”, “Leave no trace, dude” were his standing orders. But some letters offered deeper glimpses into his psyche, revealing thoughts we all share to a greater or lesser degree. “Most people don’t think they could die tomorrow,” one note said. “I don’t think that way. Don’t waste time. The world is your oyster.” Each day I awoke to his letters. “The


next-door neighbor has cancer, won’t see the spring. Fifty-five-years-old. Life is silly short, dude.” Three weeks before I moved in, I was backpacking in China. Below a picture I had posted on Facebook of me hiking The Great Wall, my dad wrote his favorite saying: “Geologically speaking, a human life is only ten seconds long.”


SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2017 25


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