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Courage to Walk Robert Waxler Spinner Publications, Inc. New Bedford, Massachusetts To Jeremy and Linda Acknowledgments There are always wonderful people to thank for making a book possible. Courage to Walk is no exception. I especially want to thank Jeremy and Linda. Jeremy, your courage throughout this difficult journey was inspirational, and I know readers, each step of the way, will find such courage uplifting. Linda, your optimism in the midst of such turmoil will always stand as a valuable lesson for all of us. I love you both with all my heart, and I dedicate this book to you. Howard Senzel, Carl Schinasi, Elizabeth Mehren, Jerry Waxler and Jim Nee—thank you so much for your willingness to read and reread my early drafts. From the beginning, your critical and sensitive comments kept me alert and helped me shape the story as it developed. I am also grateful to Elissa Ely, Francis Haines, Jane Lindenbaum, Kate and Joe Madigan, Donna and Dennis Manna, Bradie Metheny, Susan Newman and Mickey Lowenstein, Al Rabson, Adrienne and Joel Rosenblatt, Evie and David Sarles and Helen Waxler. Your advice and encouragement made more of a difference than you might imagine. And, of course, thank you to all the people at Spinner Publications: Joe Thomas, whose support is always important to me, and Marsha McCabe, Heather Haggerty, Jay Avila and Claire Nemes, for their quality work. The Hospital he table is blue pearl granite, and I have a sonnet by Rilke, printed T out from my iMac, lying on that hard stone, waiting patiently to be read. I look out across my study to the crafted shelves lining three walls, shelves overflowing with books and journals. I carefully fasten my glasses—wire-rimmed and professorial—around my ears and look down: Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were Behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter That only by wintering through it will your heart survive. Perhaps I can discuss this poem with my literature class this fall, I think, wondering where the time has gone, contemplating the possibility of retirement from the university in a year or two. It is easy to think this way in the midst of summer, the July breeze gently circling through the window, caressing the poem, lifting it slightly from the hard granite. On this warm Sunday evening, shadows of dusk dart across the lawn beneath my window, birds sing in the trees. It’s the closing of a glorious day of celebration, a day sparkling with birthday candles and two cakes, one for our son Jeremy at thirty-three, one for my elderly mother at ninety. How many days can be like this in a lifetime, I wonder, as I leave my study and go outdoors to ramble barefoot through the green grass. It is as if I am walking through a poem, Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” “Who made the world?” the poet asks, while I wander inside her creation—a grasshopper flinging herself out of the green grass, snapping her wings open and then floating away. The light dims, the shadows dance across the lawn, the dusk shapes and reshapes flickering patterns on the grass, and I am wrapped again in the poet’s words: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? Rilke and Oliver. Perhaps I can use both poems in my class this fall, the same effect achieved by such profoundly different voices. It is all an endless surprise, I think, as the moon brightens in the night sky, just a sliver of pale fire shining through the dark clouds. One never knows for sure. • Just eight years ago, they posted the results of Jeremy’s law boards on the Internet. Working for the Secretary of State, fresh out of law school, Jeremy glanced through his office window out to the Boston Harbor that day. The bright sun glistened on the blue water, boats bobbed at their moorings. But he was not really interested in that view; for him, that perspective was merely a temporary distraction, a fleeting glimpse through glass at a distance. Jeremy focused instead on the electronic images flickering on the computer screen right in front of him. He was searching for something that he could hold onto, something that might guarantee him purpose and direction. Jeremy must have stared at that computer for several hours, check- ing and rechecking. Then, like magic, a list popped up very late in the afternoon. Countless names in alphabetical order. The list seemed to materialize from nowhere, now suddenly there on the screen, ready to be read. 11 Jeremy sat straight up. His thick back, draped in a blue suit, pressed against the chair; he bent forward, his red tie loosely hanging from his neck. He scrolled down the long list of names, rapidly working his way through the alphabet. He was holding his breath the whole time, his skin warm with beads of sweat. Finally, he arrived at the Ws. He paused at the keyboard, and then started again, cautiously reading each name on the electronic screen, one at a time, until he spotted the one name, the only one, he had been searching for. He read the name to himself in a whisper: “Waxler, Jeremy R.” The telephone rang off the hook in my office in the English depart- ment. “Dad, I’m a lawyer,” he shouted, his voice filled with the wonder of someone who had just sauntered into a new world. His eyes peered through the glass window in his office; they darted across the Boston Harbor. They scanned the ocean, following the curve of time far out to the distant horizon. Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? • Adult children are always still your children, no matter how old they are. You stay attached to them forever. Their joy is your joy; their terror your terror. That bond, established at birth, stretches through a lifetime; it continues beyond the grave. That bond is timeless, everlasting. The evening after that enchanted birthday party at our house, Jeremy finishes up at his law office on Sixth Street in New Bedford. He stacks his files neatly on his desk, and we drive to the Venus de Milo restaurant in Swansea. Just the three of us. Linda, Jeremy and I. It is Monday, July 16, the official date of his birth. We celebrate his birthday like this each year: “Overstuffed lobsters at the Venus de Milo,” we shout, and then we’re off, up the old Route 6, eager to gather around the restaurant table, the three of us laughing and talking and cracking the big red lobster claws. Jeremy could be thirteen or twenty-three or 12 thirty-three, I think to myself at that table. He will always be our son, and I will always be his father, Linda his mother, no matter how old we all get. I am always glad to be with him and Linda on such nights, toasting to his future, participating in these wide-grin rituals we reenact together as a tightly knit family each and every year. To me, the young lawyer, Jeremy, is the same son who stood, proud and erect, illuminating a small stage at the local elementary school one night long ago. His feet moved back and forth then, strong legs shuffling about on that fragile platform. Like the other students, he was restless that starry night, waiting for the school superintendent to announce the next word through the screeching microphone, while the crowd remained hushed on the edge of their seats in the old auditorium. Jeremy listened intently, reflecting on each word presented to him, until, one by one, his classmates were eliminated, leaving him, finally, standing with one other young student on that big wooden stage. He was only in the fifth grade then, anxious yet confident. The superintendent leaned into the microphone, peering across the stage at the girl who had just moved forward to take her turn. “The word is knives,” he bellowed. “Can you please use it in a sentence?” the young girl squirmed in reply, twisting her hair with her fingers. The superintendent smiled as he slowly formed the sentence: “The mother set the knives on the table for supper.” The girl hesitated, shuffled about, and then finally spelled the word out: K-N-I-F-E-S. We heard the groan and felt the disappointment in the humid air as she retreated back to her spot on the stage, and Jeremy stepped up to give it his try. The superintendent leaned in again: “The word is scissors,” he said. Standing straight, Jeremy started right in, not letting anyone take a breath: S-C-I-S-S-O-R-S. The auditorium erupted with applause this time. Jeremy had won the city-wide spelling bee! We were all in an uproar. It was a moon-drenched night, as I recall. The golden trophy was almost as big as he was. Jeremy proudly carried it from the car into the 13 house that evening. He was beaming. The champion, he glowed for a week from ear to ear. We all did. I watch him now dig into his lobster, a bright smile across his face. “Jeremy, do you remember when we went down to Florida that December a few years ago?” We had headed south to see the bureaucrats trying to clarify the presidential election: Bush vs.

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