Tim and I had lunch a few days ago and talked about Salt Cay and the donkeys. About the heat and the isolation, which is for some of us a chance to breathe. We talked seriously about some friends we’ve lost, and then we laughed about what it costs to die. There are few things the two of us do not laugh about. Sometimes irreverence keeps us sane.

Not for nothing but for many years I had a map in my office of a bike route from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Coos Bay, Oregon, Sixteen-year-old Bob was going to do that ride but never did. I kept the map though. It is good to have something slightly out of touch to think about. Some sliver of purpose to sift through.

Anyway, today I called Dee and we talked long about Fr. Dan, about what happened, and about one person’s ability—his—to influence so many through time and space and his presence never seems diluted, not at all. She isn’t feeling well, though, Covid, and her already devastated immune system laid her up for a while, but she’s feeling better than she had been, coughing less she told me. I told her that’s the Italian in her, and she laughed. She has a great laugh that her mom and dad cherished. She sent a picture of herself with Timmy—a 17-year-old cat—and neither looked healthy at all. The eyes. You can tell.

The bay was a lake this morning. The river ran fast. The sun bust its ass to get above the low clouds out over the Eastern Shore this morning, and tonight it settled behind a new bank of storms hovering over the Piedmont. It’s muggy; like rain is coming. Like it did that summer with Isabel. Tim said he was told that sometimes when a storm blows through down there, a stream forms right through the middle of the tiny Island, splitting it in two.

I told Tim I’d like to spend a month at Salt Cay. With the donkeys and the small bar the size of a Jeep Cherokee, and boat the forty-five minutes to Grand Turk for food. A full month. I feel phrases simmering already and I haven’t even had drinks with the locals yet. But someday. The donkeys wander in the yard to chew on the cactus-like leaves, sometimes two or three, sometimes eight or nine, wild donkeys just grazing the cay.

When I look out across the bay to the Eastern Shore in the morning, I often think of my friend Sheri who has a place in Cape Charles which is right there but for fifteen miles of water, but she’s mostly in South Carolina now. But I think of her and how we’d laugh in the halls at the college. I had her sign one of her books once I found at a used book shop for a quarter and in the book she signed, “I can’t believe you got this for a quarter!” I thought of that this morning and about talking in the hallway and how that might have been three books ago, but the current keeps moving, doesn’t it? The current keeps moving.

Tim said the two of them stood out; like there were just the forty-something residents of the Cay and them, and I told him the trick is to stay long enough that you disappear into the landscape, and they stop seeing you as new and maybe even start wondering how long you’re going to stay, which can lead to conversations, which lead to friendships, which is why I want to go but not for a week like them, but for a month. Long enough to name the donkeys.

There are geese on the river tonight, a small flock. They’ve been around for a few weeks but for some reason tonight they felt more present, as if I realized that now that’s happening, and I remembered a post by my cousin Jack just the other day who wrote, “The Geese are heading South; summer is over.” I suppose. He lives just a dozen or so miles from Dee but they don’t know each other. Doesn’t it sometimes feel now like everyone you know knows everyone else you know? Facebook probably caused that. I once wrote a post that my friend Sean responded to which Kay responded to, and then Eddie laughed at that and commented in kind to which Mike made some hysterical retort. None of these people have ever met. None live in the same state, and none are even from the same periods of my life, but right there in one post—one picture—people from all my decades were conversing like we all met at a bar and swapped a few jokes while drinking a few beers. It lasted only a few comments, but it neatly tied up my entire existence right there next to the HIMS ad.

Yesterday my Facebook memory suggested a post of a sunrise I had taken some years ago, and of the six people who made a comment on the picture, five of them are dead. Time is out of joint. All my Bobs are floating on the surface when I really think I’d be better off if the old Bobs would just sink again, disappear again out to sea, drift over to Cape Charles, and let just one of me land a small Cessna on Salt Cay, flaps down, flying south before it gets too cold, just the one of me.

We had Princess Anne sandwiches, which are vegetarian, both Tim and me, and we talked about current projects, which we rarely do, but we also talked about the growing sense of urgency to get things out, to not die with some unpublished works still buzzing our brains at three am. We’re not popular enough for posthumous work, we decided, so everything is going to have to be moribundus at best.

Go ahead, look it up. It means “near death.” Perhaps a book of essays someday about all the people I have loved who left too soon. “Moribundus” by Bob Kunzinger, with an introduction by TS, still chasing donkeys on Salt Cay.

Dee’s voice was weak but way stronger than a few week ago. I have great admiration for people who fight. They take the “it is what it is” concept and push back on it. I hope I’m like that. I know I haven’t been. Part of that is I’ve been lucky, but a bigger part of it is I’m kind of disturbed. I’ve accepted that. Anyone who wants to spend a month on Salt Cay with donkeys has issues that even the poets won’t touch.

Anyway.

This morning at the Bay I almost called a friend of mine I hadn’t spoken to in long time but didn’t. I had no idea what to say. “What’s new?” he’d ask. “Not a lot,” I’d say, which is desperately pathetic when you think about it. It’s not like I saw him this morning; it’s been years. “How about you?” Nothing he’d say, maybe mention a new grandkid. We’d be silent for a minute with a few “it’s so great to hear your voice” comments, until I broke some silence with “Oh, I’m thinking of living with goats.” I like that I know he’d understand.

Listen: I have had one bad fucking month. Two months really. But you know what I remember? You know what surfaces when I let my consciousness stream over the days and weeks? A couple of calls from some old friends, from some people excessively important to me to just talk and laugh, to talk about music, about cats, about the sound geese make at dusk, about farms in Indiana and bears in Utah and Iowa’s Mississippi; about the beaches of Alligator Point and the long reach into the Great Lake out off of the North Coast. I like that that’s what I remember, because at night when it’s quiet, at three am when the tigers come and start gnawing on my stomach and sit their ass on my chest, It helps to know I might talk to someone again tomorrow.

I can tell them about the donkeys of Salt Cay and my plans to know them. Or about Coos Bay and how I can’t believe I was ever sixteen years old. It’s just not possible.