Sara Hall

Drawn to the Rhythm

An excerpt

In April 1995, when my children were ten, seven, and four, I drove the harbor road one late afternoon. I was in a hurry—the line at the grocery store had taken forever, and I needed to get the boys dropped off for a play date at a friend's house on Lloyd Neck and get back before the post office closed. I was distracted, thinking about the leak around the upstairs window I thought I'd fixed with roofing tar. The kids were cranky and anxious to get to their friend Michael's house before Power Rangers came on. We wound over the top ofthe hill and down the long descent to the harbor. I opened my window a crack to smell the salt and spring as we approached the tidal flats of the causewaylinking Lloyd Neck to the mainland, Lloyd Harbor on one side, Cold Spring Harbor and Oyster Bay on the other. The sun was low over the water, and one early sailboat was on a long reach from Centre Island into the cove. I rounded the end of the causeway and started down the mile of shoreline before the road to Michael's house took us into the hills. Across the narrow harbor I could see the boathouse of the local high school crew program, one door open, one pair of shoes on the dock. Other afternoons I had seen the high school crews walking their eight-man boats down the ramp, the dock on those days littered with sneakers and oars. I remember thinking how luckythey were; their parents had checked the box marked "Crew" and here they were, spending their afternoons on this sparkling harbor. Province of the young, the graceful long boats. Too late by more than twenty years for me—I missed my chance. I drove on. Then, in the moment separating what has beenfrom what will be, I fell in love.

Working its way up the shoreline was a tiny sliver of a boat, a single shell impossibly narrow, a shining white arrow moving in the late sun with liquid smoothness and divine grace. One rower, I'll never know who, one boat so gorgeous, so lyrical, so piercing that I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the car, my heart pounding. The boat moved steadily up the far shore along the sedge grasses with a quiet, measured rhythm, narrow bow riding up with an infinitesimal breath on every stroke, riding up, then cutting into the surface of the cold green water of the harbor with the stroke's subsidence, its bow wake nothing more than a shimmering crease, a neat V, like geese flying south over the harbor in a chill autumn sky. The sculler's blades, white and forest green, traveled in a graceful arc as they swung forward again and again to meet the water like a prayer—infinitely patient, infinitely repetitive—flashing in the late sun as they rolled to square just before dropping silently to incise the surface and embrace the water. With each stroke, the sculler's body swung with the rhythm of chant and breath. Over and over. It was all here before me—the rhythm of a heart, of a wingbeat, of a body in love, of a breast filling and a child nursing, of the Little Mermaid's mussel-shell roof opening and closing.

In the quiet thrust of the boat, the sweet swing of the sculler, I saw everything I wanted to be, everything I always had been beneath the sensible dresses and the sorrow. Found in that moment the mission of these hands, this body, this heart.

How did it happen that I found love in an image I'd passed a hundred times without another look? Why was I stopped in my tracks, heart in my throat, this day? Why this moment? Who was I now that I hadn't been a week before? Why was my heart ready to embrace this vision utterly, finally, in an instant? It was as if driving the harbor road with the children bickering and the radio blasting I was suddenly face to face with an image so beloved and familiar, yet so long lost that over the years I'd almost convinced myself it had never existed at all. A face rising from the cold green water and calling to me: "Remember who you are, remember. You have another chance. Come with me, come with me now . . . "

My children sometimes pore over a book that consists of page after page of apparently random patterns in which, if you look at them just right, you will discover detailed three-dimensional images. You look and look, vainly seeking the promised picture. Finally you give up, accepting that the page holds nothing but chaos. In the moment just before you turn away to find an amusement more immediately gratifying, the scene comes vividly into view and you don't understand how it could have eluded you for so long. I had driven the shore road that hour of the afternoon countless times and all I'd thought about on those days was that the water was pretty and I was in a hurry.

There are myriad stories of people who were feeding the cows or riding the subway and suddenly saw the Virgin Mary in a bale of hay or a matrix of grimy wall tiles. Out of the material of everyday life suddenly springs a glimpse of another, vastly richer dimension that brings the wheeling momentum of your existence to a standstill, your astonished reverence arresting you only long enough to take a breath before you shape the rest of your life according to what you have witnessed.

The likelihood of my falling in love with a transcendent vision on an afternoon distinguished by long lines at the grocery store and spilled grape juice that had seeped under the kitchen radiator before I could catch it with a ragged sponge was as remote as my suddenly seeing the face of Jesus in my laundry hamper. To find my heart's desire while speeding down the shore road was to find, out of a nothing, a something so monumental and so defining that my life shifted in its orbit.

I was no longer simply swept along toward the inevitable end of the long march of days and years, drifting, just along for the ride. Now my desire might propel me toward a destiny. The power of the harbor would become my power, temporal current a context in which I might move strong and clean, flexing and testing my fiber—the strength of my courage, the depth of my capacity to feel. Suddenly I felt engaged where I had been adrift, alert where I had been lulled by habit.

When I was in high school, my mother used to tell me something her mother had told her. "When you get to Heaven," she said, "and God looks in His big book under your name, He will see a list of the talents He gave you. He's going to look you in the eye and ask how you used them. You better be ready to tell Him." Whenever she told this story, I felt tired and guilty, as if life were one long oppressive all-nighter before the term paper was due, and here I was still vainly casting around for a topic. Year after year in young adulthood I would occasionally think of my mother's admonition and year after year I would wonder when God was going to shake me by the shoulders and say, "Here's your assignment. Get going!" I read What Color Is Your Parachute? in most of its editions. The last copy in my bookcase is from 1984, just before Janie was born.

In the years since, my "special gifts" were expressed in the ability to whip up three dozen cupcakes in just over an hour. But now suddenly at the age of forty-two, after decades of halfhearted searching, after not seeing the pattern in the page year after year, my topic simply presented itself to me in the form of a white boat on a riffled harbor. Though the hour was late, the pencil was sharp. As it turned out, there was still time to produce a heck of a paper.

I recognized myself as a sculler, didn't have to wish it or imagine it, knew instantly and without question who and what I was, like the Ugly Duckling who, having spent his life going from pond to pond trying unsuccessfully toquack and waddle, suddenly and with profound relief finds his flock and realizes he has undergone a lifetime of going through the motions of an existence designed for someone else.

I suppose ultimately he could have figured it out: white feathers, black beak, long snaky neck, looks like a swan, flies like a swan, trumpets like a swan. And ultimately I could have figured out, too, that my habitat was the surface of a gleaming harbor—I had loved always the cadence of a stroke and the feel of water's resistance against my hand.

But a calling doesn't come in the form of a checklist. It is heralded by an experience, a transforming moment that reveals a template for the exercise of one's "special gifts." I feel unutterably blessed to have been given such an experience-one for which many people wait in vain all their lives. Because suddenly, on a late spring afternoon in my forty-second year, I knew beyond doubt that I was destined, and had always been destined, to feel all the rhythms of life and sing them with every stroke.