Once More

When I taught freshman English (composition, 101, 1101) at Augusta Tech, E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” was the essay I used as an example of narrative descriptive writing. I love the essay, and I enjoyed teaching it. And then my father died.

Needless to say, the essay hit me in a different place after I crossed that threshold. I remember being thankful that we were well past that unit the semester that Daddy died. I don’t think I could have spoken about it without crying. You see, I also grew up going to a lake with my family.

We didn’t have those early twentieth century month-ling vacations, just a week at the beach in the summer, maybe another one in the spring, but usually to the mountains then. The lake was summer weekends. Camping, fishing, boats, water skiing, adults drinking beer around a fire after the burnt burgers and hot dogs, or maybe fresh bream or bass had been consumed and cleared away.

This was in the late 1970s and early 80s, before cable television was widely available, when phones had cords, beer cans had pull tabs, seat belts were optional, and the world hadn’t been shaken since the events of the year I was born, when Nixon’s Watergate scandal made a football player from Michigan President of the United States. The Berlin Wall was accepted as an immovable iron curtain, and American Bandstand and Soul Train followed Saturday morning cartoons. It was a simpler time for me—I was a child.

Reading White’s essay each term always evoked memories of my own time at the lake with my father, and I always read with my students in hopes of learning something new from the text. On my first read after my father’s passing, the last line hit me with my own mortality. I felt the chill of death in my own bones for the first time. It’s good to be in the company of great writers when feeling that for the first time. There’s comfort in keeping the cold hands of death from truly taking any of them from us.