Thunder River Lodge

“Every thing is sacred and, nothing is as sacred as we want it to be…”

-Beth Orton, “Central Reservation”.

When Shel Silverstein died, I was working in a coffee shop in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. I remember reading about it in the newspaper, so it was definitely a while ago. I locked the door, put up a ‘back in 5’ sign, and cried.

Earlier in the year, I was teaching a class and someone told me that J.D. Salinger had died. Unbelieving, I asked him how he knew this. Pointing to the wireless-device-of-the-moment, he explained that that’s what ‘it’ said. I didn’t have the luxury of mourning in the moment this time. In fact, my sadness was almost instantly overshadowed with anger as he continued to read the news feed aloud. They speculated about his ‘hermetic’ life, that perhaps he was unstable, drinking his own urine, and so on. I stopped and abruptly blurted out.

“That may very well be, but he still wrote “The Catcher in the Rye” and none of us did!”

After an appropriate and awkward silence, as I have been known to cause on many occasions, I gave the class a break in order to collect myself.

It is not so much the passing of these two authors that struck me so deep. What they represented is what I grieved for. Each had been a symbol of different times in my life, just as their deaths would mark two different seasons in my life later on.

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry as a child. His craftsmanship and storytelling ability were conveyed in short, often silly, ( though sometimes quite poignant) poems. Tales of children who would not take the garbage out, who tried to fake sick to stay home from school, and all the seemingly universal things we experience as kids. He never condescended. It was like he was a peer, and because of that, his work was seared into my brain. Classics like The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends mark the beginning of my obsession with language. Words somehow make a thing real, sacred even, steady in time unlike the rest of our existence. Of course, I didn’t know this then. I don’t know that I have ever really thought too much about it until this moment.

J.D. Salinger, though vulgar, cynical, and rebellious in the manifestation of the character Holden Caulfield, represented a similar rite of passage. The late teenage years with my friends Rob and Emily come to mind. I outed myself to them on the long drive out of Kansas, literally heading to the foothills of Colorado’s Purple Mountain Majesty. It was my first trip there. The running joke was “Ma’am, this is NOT a motel!” The origin of that joke comes from a woman who claimed that the GIANT motel sign in her front lawn was indeed “not a motel!” Emily kept looking up at it, then back to her. She yelled this proclamation once more, and we sought shelter for the night at the nearby Thunder River Lodge.

I didn’t know at the time that I would watch both Rob and Emily’s mothers succumb to cancer, at different intersections of my life. Watching Emily’s mother pass would be incredibly difficult, as I seem to have a knack for engaging other people’s mothers, though my own is still alive in another time zone. We have only engaged in deafening silence for a decade.

There is a ‘want’ that I am not sure I will ever quite satisfy. Wanting what I can’t have, or don’t have, or the heartbreaking decision to forfeit what I do have. is what these two authors mean to me. Not their words, but the experiences marked by them. It is the stuff that I cannot pin down that fascinates me, the pieces summed up in memory that I can hopefully convey with storytelling. It is a daily reckoning. I am a human in motion and I will never pass this way again.

For Ricardo