Rain. Photo Credit: dehayf5MHWL7.cloudfront.net
The rain is beating against the window glazing with tiny, crystal-ball hands. You can see your entire world reflected there if you look hard and long enough, only small and coiled up inside a minuscule globe. Billowing sheets are down there hopscotching their round foot prints across the parking lot like some ghost of a lost tropical storm were puzzled to find herself in my neighborhood and she does not know where to turn next. I start when I realize that I have been staring so long out the office window. The light is failing; night is coming and I can begin to see myself, there in the window—like the portrait of a ghost, too, a framed specter sprinting through the gray hissing gauntlet. Strange it seems to me, but when the light it is that rose and gray just before sunset or when some twist of the quotidian ordinary pricks loose some fragment of a memory or the smallest piece of a memory of a feeling that it flings up against the inside of my head or the backside of my eyes, I will wander off into a melancholy place. That is where I am, now, and there I find my grandfather, Pa—Theodore Noah Webster Moates.
Pocket Contents
I do not recall not knowing him or when I first realized that this rock of a man was my ancestor and I, his progeny. Yet my recollections are really few, much like the contents of a small boy’s pockets: in my right front I find a marble, a pebble, a penny from 
1947, the year of my birth; in the left, a jack knife with one of the grips missing—lost playing mumbly peg, and two bent rusting nails, one square, one round. I lay the contents of my pocket memory on the sill beneath the window that never has opened before and I see a Mount Rushmore-ian figure. I see his towering head with its craggy nose and high domed brow.
I did not think of his beginning until he died. He seemed always to have been there, an ancient sun baked creature speaking slowly, wisely, steadily even as his calloused carpenter’s hands oscillated tremulously with “the palsy.” He smelled of cigarettes—“I’d walk a mile for a Camel”—an exotic, dark tobacco aroma that hung on his clothes like an invisible mantle of virility. And there was also that faint, strange sweet yeasty smell that was both the comfort and the curse of another Noah after the legendary flood.
Theodore Noah Webster Moates ca.June 1969 Panama City Florida Photo credit: the author, his grandson
Pa was one of the oldest human beings that I knew as a child, though I doubted even then that he had been acquainted with the ark builder, even though my grandfather was builder too. I suspected they had more in common than I could understand, but I realize now that I did not really know him well, despite our times of tales on the screened porch, tales of the days before paved roads in Florida, when the Moates family traveled by buckboard wagon two days to visit Aunt Sadie. I can see the pair of white sandy tracks of the trail when Pa speaks. He smiles when he recounts how in a sudden thunderstorm they find shelter in an abandoned smokehouse—all that remained of a farm stead build before the war—the War Between the States, that is. Settling back in his aluminum lawn chair, my grandfather paints a dark and mysterious still life study with his drawled words, a picture of close, black restless sleep in the ancient building, smelling of age and decay and hams. Suddenly he leans forward, grabs my hand, and blurts out: “I snapped to when I felt something awful wet and hairy slam in my face.”
“What was it?” I demand breathlessly.
“Well, I couldn’t rightly say.” He is stalling. “Until the next flash of light’n showed up some wild goats go a-runnin’ out the door that was a-bangin’ in the wind. They was as sceerd as we was, I reckon.”
We both laugh—I in my child’s high rattle, he in his deep rumble that sounds like the breakers of the gulf that slam against the shore. Pa’s chuckle is powerful like thunder itself that makes you shake, laughing or not, in spite of yourself.
Amazing Camellias!
I see him now walking after the rain among his camellia bushes, and I remember the mischief in his eye. Pa had found a mail order catalog that advertised growth hormone. With a vial of the magic elixir he treats each bud of every plant in his garden. He even secretly applies it one twilight evening to the camellias of his friend and neighbor, as well, across the sandy street. Weeks later she brags to Pa about how green is her thumb. Pa only chuckles mysteriously and never lets slip the truth of his evening rounds. Now it makes me smile that for fifty years she never figured out what she had done that miraculous year to make such beautiful and grand blossoms.
There is so much that I do not know or have forgot. I feel it all slipping away like the sand of a castle on the beach as the surf flings foaming salt water higher on the shore when the tide moves in. I can cling to the few grains that volunteered on the back of my hand, but why did I not grab up whole handfuls and stuff them into my pockets? But that I had been wiser than the child I was! Pa, I am now a grandfather myself. Now I wish I could know you; now perhaps I could understand. But all I have is remembrances and faded photographs.
I can no more relive the past than I can return the rain to the sky. I can only treasure the memories I hold in my pocket and, on occasional rainy days and in rare quiet moments take them out and amble among them. This I will do and Pa, you will be remembered and loved again.
Beach after the rain, before night. Empty. Photo credit: the author
Sam Matteson 