The Summer of Work and Love

Zach was not prepared for the content of the small box sitting on his dresser. It was the ashes of his dog, Mickey.  A month earlier, he came home from college to be with his dog when the veterinarian put her down.  The family chose to have the dog cremated.  The ashes were to be strewn over the back flower bed Mickey loved to trample each year.  Zach's Mom insisted the ashes be saved for the scattering ceremony until Zach was home again.  As was usual for a son away at college, the message never got to Zach.  The ashes were a shock.

It was the summer after his sophomore year at Macalester  College, in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Nobody understood why Zach once decided to jump out of perfectly good airplanes during his "skydiving phase"; and now no one understands why a boy from the lower Midwest would decide to spend his winters in Minnesota.  Zach always was an enigma.  He did things on his own schedule and for his own reasons.

  For reasons everyone understands, Zach spent the summer in St. Paul running the college's "summer programs."  It was his first summer away from home and his second summer to be in a long-distance love relationship.  Work and love - these were the two great themes for the summer of 1999. 

  "Running summer programs" on campus meant Zach was part public relations specialist and part hotel concierge.  He welcomed visitors, got them ensconced in dorm rooms, furnished them with meal tickets, and solved their own "away from home" problems.  Some arrived speaking little English but making big demands.  One especially agitated group showed up unexpectedly at 2:30 a.m., seven hours early.  The brash leaders wondered - loudly - why Zach was not offering warm greetings, coordinated room assignments and freshly made beds.  Zach was working hard.

Love was a challenge too.  Brooke, the lady of his life, was in Wisconsin, working in a group home for severely disabled adult wards of the state.  She joined Zach in "work" with a harsher, sharper edge; a side of life experienced by choice, but not without its subtle shocks to the uninitiated.  Zach and Brooke come from protective parent stock, as you will see; and  in the summer of 1999, they were learning why working world adults crash and burn on Friday nights.

***
Mickey's remains were surprisingly heavy.  A 13-year old  golden retriever reduced to stark white ashes and dense bone chips carries weight one does not expect.  Zach and Brooke put them back on the dresser, and Zach made a mental note to talk to his father about the "surprise" package.
Zach and Brooke were making their "summer's end" visit to Missouri.  They had spent a few days at Madeline Island in  Lake Superior with Brooke's parents.  Now they were visiting "his" parents.  Zach wondered, just briefly, if this was what marriage was like.

On Madeline Island, two significant things happened to bring some kind of closure to the Work and Love Summer of 1999.  First, Zach found a magnificent rock.  It was huge, about 60 pounds, with a hole the size of a coffee can though its middle. The rock was a light rose color and weathered smooth; there was talk it might have once had use as an anchor.  In typical Zen fashion, the rock with the hole in it was just waiting for Zach on the beach.  There was no choice but to take it home.  Brooke's dad somehow became part of the move from beach to the trunk of Zach's 1985 Toyota Camry.  The rock was ponderous.  Both men took separate pleasure in the task - the rock communicated across generations.
 
The rock was a treasure because of the hole.  Zach's dad directed a summer camp for kids in the mid-1980's where rocks with holes were rare and honored as "friendship" rocks.  The great adventure of the summer camp was to innertubing down Fishing River looking for snakes, mud slides - and rocks.  Rocks shaped like hearts, rocks with faces and rocks with holes festoon Zach's homestead.  Now he was bringing home the greatest friendship rock of all time.  His dad would be humbled with pride -his son was turning out all right after all.

The second adventure must remain a secret and is the reason this story must always stay in a tight circle of friends.

On Madeline Island there is a holy place.  At an almost unrecognizable turnoff in the road lies a side path.  A sign warns there is to be no trespassing.  A second warning sign declares what is to come is not a tourist attraction and requests all who are "reading this sign" to please leave.  If one perseveres, the curiosity being unbearable, down the path and into a clearing there exists an astonishing sight - a miniature town. The houses are about the size of small coolers and made of rough concrete, carefully designed and crafted; though also  tender and primitive at the same time. The town is actually laid out with the resemblance of streets and  buildings, including readily recognizable forms such as a church and stores.  At a distance, proportional to the size of the town buildings, there are farms and homesteads, each with their own concrete structures.

Zach and Brooke, together with Brooke's parents, bore witness to this sanctuary.  All were silenced and spiritually moved by the village.  The air around them seemed saturated with the private emotions of the unknown workers/artists who had created the strange community.  The newest of the structures was only about thirty years old.  The others could possibly date back to the early part of the century.  It offered the sense of a memorial.  Living graves came to mind and a sensibility that those who discovered this place were standing on sacred ground. 

Zach kept to himself as he mulled over who might have done this and why.  The concrete houses were obviously a labor of some love. He heard the music of emotion marking this moment in his life.  Like a fine jazz riff that carries its own unexplainable meaning, the place somehow affirmed his own living. That memory - and the rock - came back with Zach to Missouri and his boyhood home.
Last spring, Brooke had spent a semester in France studying painting and her own life in a larger world.  Zach had gone to visit, and together they experienced the special joy the French seem to reserve just for young lovers.  Everywhere they went during an enchanted April, the adults watched and sighed.  They gushed over the pair with favor and warmth, "slobbered", Zach would say later. 
Now at summer's end, staying as guests with their respective parents, that same sense of exceptional pleasure echoed through the days - with one obvious difference.  Between Lake Superior and Missouri, Zach and Brooke were wined and dined not by strangers, but by parents.  Each remarked on the amazing similarities between two families, who had never met.  Both families sought strong relationships with their children; both encouraged their children to take appropriate risks. The fathers were almost exactly the same age with a history of art and music between them.  The mothers were strong and formed the primary relationships with their children.
 
It was in this comfortable setting, at a time of ease, with the huge rock in a wheelbarrow, and the companion memories of France, the summer on campus, and the miniature village firmly etched in the backdrop of his life, that Zach dealt with Mickey's ashes.

Nothing was actually said about Mickey's ashes during the entire visit, except Zach's vocal surprise at finding the unannounced memorial on the dresser in his room.  Brooke flew back to Minneapolis a day before Zach drove back himself.  In the mid-morning silence before the beginning the drive, however, Zach took Mickey's heavy ashes to the back flower bed and spread them out for one last symbolic romp.  Zach was alone, but the memory of his dog was with him.

Some have said the past is only a bucket of ashes. If that is true, the future is just a heap of dead wood.  Zach stood in his moment between the two taking inventory of his dog and the strange summer of love and work.  For those who live in the present, their timing is always impeccable.  Letting go of the ashes, a chance breeze blew some of the fine powder back on Zach's shoes.
The drive up to St. Paul was uneventful. When one has learned to know a road well, s/he will often mock it aloud as if it were an annoying younger brother.  Inside, however, there is an assurance in "knowing" a road.  With summer ending, comforting routines started to form.  Zach's dad put the world's largest friendship rock just outside the side door where he passes each day  -his heart still full with pride.  The cement village, by silent understanding, is a private family story for two households, told in hushed reverence, too much to be held by words.  The back flower bed is growing like crazy, full of zinnias big as waffle house pancakes. 

Zach arrived back at school and wondered where his summer had gone.  His supposed time of leisure and youthful flings had left him worn out and needing a nap.  Challenges were everywhere.  The work schedule at Blockbuster Video was deemed "hideous," and the new RA training smacked of "Nazi Germany."  Brooke, he discovers, is stressed over the life-defining challenge of reentry from a sensory semester abroad to a senior year of college and the overbearing questions surrounding "the future."  Noxious youthful angst is in the air. Topping everything, school would start soon and life could only get more intense. 

Then Zach saw the powder on his shoes and cracked a smile.  The cement houses, the anchor, and now his dead dog had somehow connected in the million tiny neurons that create his conscious life.  A fading summer was taking its place in memories. The blurred issues that consumed and then confused the past few months came into focus.  "Good-bye, Mickey-dog,"  Zach whispered. 
Outside, a first Macalester leaf was turning a deep red. Inside Zach's head a killer jazz saxophone played what could become a classic, The Summer of Work and Love.




Jim Dunn
Edited by Kathy Dunn
September, 1999