Grace Note

I was working on a large memoir, trying to recount every little significant detail that I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and there was one moment in particular that I wanted to capture as vividly as I could. It was a morning many years ago when I was returning home for the funeral of an old friend. It was just before dawn, and I was taking a ferry across a large open lake. The passengers were all standing there in silence lined up in a row along the railing, looking down into the water. I could just make out the shapes of mountains on the far shore against the dark blue backdrop of the stars. As we headed towards a narrow channel between two rocky cliff faces that separated this section of the lake from another broader portion of it, I saw the glow of the sunrise behind the rocks, and I knew that the sun was waiting there on the other side of the lake.

And it was that moment of passing through the channel that I wanted to capture, that anticipation of the sun on the other side and how it suddenly hit me with the full devestating impact of the loss of my friend, leaving me to feel completely alone on the Earth, even the way home navigated through strange dark waters. So I added an improvised flute player to the scene. As we passed into the channel, another passenger standing towards the back of the ferry took out a flute from his brown duffel bag and began to play a single soft note, high and mournful. And I thought that I could grab this note out of the air and use it. If I could establish the key that the note was in and the precise intervals at which it reverberated between one rock face and the other, I could place the exact dimensions of this narrow channel directly into the reader's mind through the use of a single onamonapoetic phrase. I could put them right there in the scene with the light and the loss and that lingering sound of the note fading on the air as we emerged on the other side of lake to the low mist, the huge sky, the land in the unobtainable distance, and someone standing far off on a dock across the water waving a lantern to guide our way.