Recently, Yet Long Ago

My subconscious has been busy lately, churning out dreams almost every night. I’m not one of those people who generally finds dreams particularly interesting to talk about, and my conscious mind is good at blocking them out once I get up in the morning. They don’t amount to much more than a vague itch – an unmistakable sensation of having taken a trip somewhere recently, yet long ago.

It reminds me of when I look at my photographs from my travels in Europe back in 1987 and ’88, and I try to put myself back into that time. Can I recall the sights, sounds and smells of that particular place?

There are several moments that have stayed vividly with me over the course of all these years. One happened on the Greek island of Paros, where we stayed for a few days with our friend Sally Wattles. On a sunny morning I sat down at a café table with a cup of coffee and the Guardian newspaper. The restaurant sat right in the middle of the docks where the fishing boats moored. Old men with dried-apple faces smoked cigarettes, mended fishing nets and cleaned octopus, the rigging of the boats jingling in the gentle, steady rise and fall of the tide.

The coffee was a good, strong Mediterranean blend – the kind of coffee to which I became accustomed while living in Spain and which I still drink to this day. When I licked my lips, the salt from the sea breeze played off the bitter-sweetness of the coffee. The smell of seaweed and the morning’s catch hung heavy in the heat of that morning on August 2, 1988.

I know the date because of what came next. There in the midst of all those intense sensations I opened the paper and read the words “America’s Chekhov Dead at 50,” and there was a photo of a familiar face – my literary mentor, Raymond Carver, had died of lung cancer, his wife, Tess Gallagher by his side.

I read the article which recalled Ray’s difficult life and how writing had given him a second chance. Finishing my coffee, I thought about how sad it was that I would never again experience the thrill of opening the New Yorker magazine and reading a new Carver story.