Herman Melville

Before the storm

A man with a mop of hair, propped on his bike in the middle of Old Helderberg Road, talks on a cell phone, a block away from where Herman Melville went to high school, both the man and Melville young Albany locals wondering about the future, recording this day in time. My son, on a stay in Tel Aviv, tells me on his cell phone that he read in the NY Times that Hitler’s bodyguard died yesterday, he was 97. Old age, World War II, fading from direct memory as our fathers die. Today people are clinging to September 11th, talking about it with strangers, remembering where they were, what they were like at the time, talking on cell phones, forming a reason for its place in the one and the all. When I was small I saw a newsreel at the Syosset wide-screen movie theatre showing a reunion of Civil War veterans, with grinning, toothless survivors of the North army and the South in mock war poses then laughing together; hobbled on wooden legs, shaking their canes jauntily at each other. Afterwards, I watched “Around the World in 80 Days” in Todd-AO, about two relatively small men racing history and time, ending with a day found that they thought was lost forever. Which days would we want to replay, which stories rewrite, which memories erase? Our very worst days, our very best ones. Stop, take the phone call, make your point, remake the moment, before it all happens, before the storm, then get back on the bike and rush ahead and confound history and time, right here along Old Helderberg Road.