Lucky

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Updated Mar 03, 2013 @ 06:02 AM

Lucky

By Terry Marotta

Lucky. He is lucky.

We are lucky, all of us in whose lives Gary has played a part. He was hit by a 15-person van just before dawn on Thursday while running with his friend Scott.

Word is, when Scott sat up, Gary was 30 feet away unconscious and bleeding from the head.

I first met Gar when he was in 7th grade. He and his sister Susan began coming to our house many days after school. And now when he comes to Boston we still have the pleasure of having him here in this house.: He sits working at his laptop in the living room. I sit working at mine one floor above him. He still paces when he talks on the phone, just like he did in middle school. I remember when he was 15 he blushed to see evidence of his own printing on an application he was making to prep school; he said it looked like something Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would have written.

Last night my friend Marcia celebrated her 90th birthday. I couldn’t be at her party but when she sent me this poem by Mary Oliver, I felt as if she were right in the room with me and knew just what all of us are feeling in this broadly defined family that Gary has gathered around himself over the years. It was written in autumn I guess but its message couldn’t be more timely for us all now, as Gary is ushered safely hour by hour toward a return to health.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Thank God that time has not come yet.

Here’s Gary on the left with his one-of-a-kind brother John and between them their darling baby sister Susan, all from the days when I seemed to be cooking all day long in this house and the bookbags of the young covered every surface.