Dandelion Summer

"Dandelion Summer"

Chapter 1


J. Norman Alvord

A single drop of water changes the ocean. A noted colleague of mine once asserted this as we dawdled over lunch at a restaurant near Cape Canaveral. “How can it not?” he demanded. “Some amount of matter is displaced. There’s transference of energy. Nothing is as it was before.” We were young then, certain of our own importance. Convinced that our presence in the world, that our work, was destined to change it. “I discussed it with Einstein, you know,” he said, and went on to share a story of having accompanied the physicist on a fishing trip, of all things. They’d considered the drop-of-water theory while Einstein reclined on the deck of a sailboat, trails of pipe smoke drifting lazily into the air. Less than a year after their conversation, Einstein’s sudden demise sent a ripple around the world.

There are those men whose deaths displace water in the far parts of the sea, and then there are those for whom the pool seems to have dried up long ago. So much of a life can pass without a thought of where the journey might end. A young man’s days grow full and his nights become short, and his mind is crowded with all that must be done, and all that has been done, and all that waits to be done. Hours come and go, a rush of time that seems limitless as it passes.

Looking back through the haze of years, you wish to whisper in the young father’s ear, tell him to put away his books and his calculations, go out into the yard and play a game of kickball, stop worrying about engineering the best tree house on the block and just climb the tree. Sit quietly in its branches with a son or a daughter and watch the minutes drift by in glorious splendor, as aimless as the cloud ships in a summer sky.

There comes a time when the opportunity for sailing cloud ships is gone, when time is not just passing, but speeding toward something. You attempt to communicate this truth to the young people now, but to them you’re just an old man growing uncomfortably sentimental.

You remember, of course, when you stood where they are. There were mountains to be scaled, bridges to be built, bills to be paid, work to be done. A man’s work defines him when he is young. Time flows as water through an estuary, accomplishments collecting like leaves in the brackish tide pools against the shore. The water hides beneath them, moving yet invisible, placid on the surface. Accolades amass in tidy black frames and hang on a wall to be dusted and polished, straightened now and again if tipped askew by a child visiting the office, or a cleaning woman brushing by with a feather duster, or a colleague leaning casually against the paneling, stroking his chin.