Note: this was originally published on my Substack on July 10, 2022. I deleted that Substack a couple years ago and I’m reposting these here so they don’t get lost.

Recently we drove to Boston and stayed at a downtown hotel for a couple nights. The city is only two hours away but like everybody else we don’t have much money; we sometimes visit but we never stay overnight. Unlike my wife and I, the children have never lived in the city so we did the things tourists do. We hiked the hills of the old North End to see the relics of the War for Independence, shopped at the Haymarket bazaar, strolled through Quincy Market in the center of Boston. A couple weeks after our visit a fascist gang called Patriot Prayer marched proudly and unopposed through the same plaza. Like the tour guides dressed in Revolutionary War costumes they were keeping alive the old spirit of that revolt, the war of the elites in the tax-hating North allied with the wealthy slave-owners in the South. We Americans want so badly to forget that spirit to be innocent lovers of freedom. These new suburban tourists parade their malice through our streets masked like the Klan and armored like toy soldiers, to remind us we still are in the United States, still on contested ground.

We took a crowded morning ferry across Boston Harbor to visit Georges Island. Ringing the center is Fort Warren, a crumbling granite hulk gleaming and looming in the sunlight. Built to defend the harbor it quickly became that most American of institutions, a prison; it housed defeated Confederate soldiers who passed their time shut in bricked rooms or sweating on the shadeless lawn of the parade ground.

Now that it stands empty it resembles nothing so much as a giant forlorn sculpture. Bereft of purpose it retired into that afterlife we call history.

My favorite thing about Georges Island is the seaglass. The rough pebbled shore is sprinkled with glass of every color and form you could think of, along with chunks of old porcelain and chunks of brick all smooth-polished by harbor water, salt, and island breezes. Remnants of cargo lost at sea or thrown overboard, wholes shattered into pieces like the millions of rounded stones clattering in the surf. Bent to the forces of nature, which are truthfully the forces of time. Glass as sand furnaced into molded vessels then shattered; shattered like great mountains risen from the crust cracked into pocketfuls of skipping stones. The pieces have formed their own wholes now. However much they break the pieces multiply into new units of being.

*Pieces harvested from the island shore.*

The seaglass is beautiful garbage, Fort Warren is historic garbage, cast-offs treasured for their uselessness. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal art piece captures this perfectly; to this day it enrages consumers who want their garbage to know its place.

Looking out at the colorful hulls skimming the waves I contemplate my own place now. My oldest child is an adult now, leaving for college soon, with the other two soon to follow. I used to think my role was to be a talented and brilliant youth. When that illusion burned away I decided my role was to be a leader in my profession, being an archivist; that aspiration drained away when I struck middle age having contributed exactly nothing of value to anyone in my field. The one aspiration that has, I think, panned out was my deep desire to be a just and loving father and spouse.

Now I see the trick parenting always held up its sleeve: the better you perform your parental role the faster you hurry yourself into obsolescence. Children have to shatter their old lives to grow up into their own wholes. The forces of nature, which are truthfully the forces of time. My wife and I hold to each other; we can already feel ourselves being washed and salted and drifting towards unfamiliar shores.

Of course we fear the future, how could we not? The biosphere shuffles towards mass extinction. The corridors of power are split, fanatical cruelty to the right, feckless avarice to the left. Americans are numb to our own pain, resigned to our commissions of victims in waiting. I don’t want my daughter to have any part of this world. But she yearns for it. She wants to work to make things better somehow. How does this beautiful person share the same species as the fascist bullies of Patriot Prayer? But my wife and I know her well enough to believe she can do it. The pride, the faith, the trust in her makes it all the more bittersweet.

During our trip to Boston we visited the Institute for Contemporary Art. The main exhibit right now is a piece by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama titled LOVE IS CALLING. You enter a medium-sized room completely paneled by mirrors. Glowing, polka-dotted, inflatable tendrils reach up through the ceiling and floor. Kusama’s voice is there too, reciting a tender love poem in Japanese. Is there a single word in any language that capture it? Disorientation, amusement, recognition, melancholy, wonderment? If there is such a word I wish knew it. I think I would be using a lot from now on.

You have a few minutes in the LOVE IS CALLING room, then you have to go so the next group can come in. You come out into the gallery, then you exit through the gift shop, you make your way outside and back to the train and back home, and it’s all a little different than before, changed somehow by what you’ve seen and where you’ve been. Things age, they break, the shards become jewels. It’s the forces of nature, which are, truthfully, the forces of time.