when finally set free

when i was a young boy, i used to sit at the kitchen table with my grandpa, listening to his stories and laughing at his jokes. i was old enough to know how much bullshit he was interjecting, but still young enough that he held my full attention.

that emerald isle.

he told me about the legendary monster from boggy creek, painting a swampy and shadowy picture of our families' irish heritage.

he conjured images of smoky bars where drunken irishmen nursed their guinness and played sad songs on fiddles and the pipes.

but best of all were the dirty limericks he would tell once my mother had left the room.

when she would get up and walk out, my grandpa would shoot me a secret smirk; a touch of a leprechaun's golden glint in his eye. he held between his wrinkled fingers a cigarette. the frosty grey smoke silently curled toward the nicotine-yellow ceiling.

there once was a man from clare
who was screwing his wife on the stair
but the bannister broke
and in his last stroke
he finished her off in the air

we would both be laughing before he was done telling it, him leaning back in his chair and roaring heartily from the gut, the guffaw of an old man who is wise enough to not take anything seriously anymore. it’s only life, after all.

sometimes my mom would overhear from the next room. she would rush in, screeching against our chorus of laughter: "dad! don’t be telling him those things!!"

when he was young, my grandpa played baseball with the chicago cubs. we would play catch in the backyard with the worn-out and well-oiled gloves he kept in the shed. later, when i was in high school, he would come watch my games.

during a holiday or summer break when i was in college in arizona, i would fill him in on how my flying lessons were going. he would tell me about how he used to fly F-18s during the revolutionary war. still full of shit.

one summer i went to europe, finally seeing the ireland of his stories and connecting with the place where my family had come from.

across the waters.

he was always impressed with my exploits, but sometimes i would sense a certain silent grief in him. a dream that had slipped away silently.

you look away for a second, and 40 years pass you by.

he never talked about it, but those honest eyes always betrayed the frustrations of a man who yearned for adventures that never happened.

in the end, it was the cigarettes that got him.




******




we steam upriver; pretty swedish girls and sunshine and swampy banks. boggy creek. past the purplish hippos whose heads pop up, wriggling their pink ears like cowbells, investigating the disturbance. interrupting feeding time.


past the toothy crocs lounging on the bank, scales glistening; mouths open.


an african fish eagle circles lazily overhead, her sharp eyes searching for perch caught in the eddys. elephants stroll along the banks, leisurely finding lunch. the metallic buzz of tsetse flies hangs heavy in the humidity. and the quiet movement of water, always downwards. it knows the way to the sea.

the sounds of a symphony.


there she is. the most impressive feature on the 4,184 mile-long nile river. murchison falls. as it enters the rapids just upstream, the entire flow of the massive nile is compressed into a tiny, 20-foot wide channel. she voices her displeasure at this restriction. 11,000 cubic feet per second tumble down in madness through this staircase slot. a 400-foot drop in all, slamming into the abyss; echoing into eternity. an epic waterfall. a very impressive piece of whitewater.


hiking up the trail for a closer view, i stand on the edge of the precipice. looking down into the billowing, pillowing, mushroom bomb clouds of water, rocketing 60 feet up into the sky. it would be hopelessly impossible to survive a ride through here.

still, as a boatman, i am full of lust and wonder: what would it be like to raft this?

alas, this knowledge is not for the world of men.


reaching into my pocket, i retrieve a small bag. i pull out some of his chalky grey ashes and hold them in my hand. i feel his firm handshake, see his smiling eyes, hear his genuine and trusty laugh. i decide to give grandpa the adventure of his life. gently spreading my fingers and letting him flow out; dropping into the current. finding his line. staring into the void. accelerating into surrender.

i imagine him hollering for joy as he takes a journey no mere mortal could survive; plummeting and rushing and feeling it hit with full force. then drifting slowly down the pools past hippos and crocs and other pretty swedish girls on steamships; slowly winding down, meandering through the plains of uganda and into the deserts of sudan. past the pyramids and sleeping pharoahs of egypt and home into the warm waters of the mediterranean.


maybe he can tell me about it later over a guinness; up there in the boathouse in the sky.