When Memories Are All That's Left to You

I had a moment yesterday while driving where, while still functioning, I spent a moment elsewhere. I was sitting at a traffic signal so even though my mind wandered, the car wasn't wobbling or weaving.

I didn't have a Charles Lamb moment by any stretch of the imagination. Point in fact it was a memory of a place I have been, once, a number of years ago with my wife and daughter in Waterford. 

It's just a place, not someplace with any special meaning for me or mine but known to the locals that when we were there had started becoming an object of contention that may not be over, even now. 

But that's not what I revisited, exactly. 

Rather, I was standing there on the sort of jetty that faces out into Long Island Sound which in turn flows into the Atlantic Ocean but I was also on the beach in The Highlands, on the Jersey Shore with Grampy, my Mom's dad, as a very small child perhaps no more than five or six (if that) and facing the ocean, I waved.

I would always wave to the children of Europe whom he assured me were standing on beaches just like ours and peering past the horizon, or trying to and waving back. It wasn't for many years that I realized none of it was true or could ever be true, but it was a wonderful story and I was tempted that day in my memoy to double pump a quick wave, one for the little boy of long ago on that faraway beach and the other for Jim Kelly, the little boy's uncle and his mother's brother, with Grampy standing beside me as the waves kissed the shore goodnight and goodbye.
-bill kenny