F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 0 ![]() WALKING WITH WALTER
by Sebastian Matthews | |||||||||||||
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Walter wants to know how I am doing so far, what I think of this and that. It's a simple gift to be in the beam of Walter's interest. And there's something of the dignitary in Walter's way with people, crossbred as it is with the absent mind of the professor and the sure hand of the gentleman farmer (straight out of some lesser-known Frost poem). A soul emissary, then, who at present -- as we pass up through the bristling pines, along a New England stone wall -- is asking about my father, recently dead, about how it has been dealing with the aftermath and all the troubled souls that end up at the door of the dead poet's house uninvited. He seems to understand: brother, father, teacher -- yes, even son. He's that good at listening. And listening, too, for some echo out of the forest, some crow flap to awaken an answer (in me?). He just nods. We keep walking, and as we go forward, me conjuring my love for my father, I feel some hidden part dislodge, take wing, fly up to join the crow in the late-afternoon haze -- my body moving onward with Walter, as lightly as cumulus clouds passing soundlessly over water.
Sebastian Matthews is a visiting writer at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California. His work has appeared in The New England Reviewand Jacaranda Review. Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; February 2000; Walking With Walter; Volume 285, No. 2; page 76. |
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