In companionable silence

    

     My older son and I sat on the riverside park bench in companionable silence — his term, coined years ago to describe those rare intervals when his father shuts up and just lets everything be.
     A feat I like to think I'm getting better at. Shutting up, as I've said before, is an art form, and like any creative discipline, requires practice. I'm aided in that of late I sincerely have nothing to say to him. Not that my life is uninteresting, I hope. It's just that it's interesting in the same way now as it was last week and last month and last year and the year before and five, 10 and 20 years ago. I write a newspaper column, tend to a century plus house, am the lesser half of a stable marriage. There isn't a lot of news, particularly since we talk every week, more or less. So rather than fill the silence with endless prattle — my go-to move — I've learned to just sit. In companionable silence.

      Jersey City was never on my mental map before he lived there; how could it be, with the supernova of Manhattan glittering across the water? I wouldn't have been able to tell you whether it was 100 miles away or, as it is, one PATH train stop beyond Lower Manhattan. Jersey City is a very livable little urban environment — that is, if a city of more than a quarter million people can be called "little." It manages to be both populated and deserted. We walked around quite a lot, and barely had to look both ways crossing the street. The only peril was the light rail system, and the narrow train blares a horn if it seems as if you're about to blunder in front of it. Otherwise, empty block after empty block --  everybody seemed somewhere else, except for the big street festivals, which seem to take place every night we're in Jersey City.    

     Thursday, I shared a leafy photo taken Wednesday from across the Concord River, near the Old North Bridge in Massachusetts.  Today I thought this  very different view, calming and marvelous in its own way, approaching the complexity of nature. Another panorama across another river — the Hudson, at what my son calls FiDi — the Financial District of New York, dominated by One World Trade Center, the former Freedom Tower, which was built, finally, after long dithering, next to the footprint of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, now converted to a very moving memorial — well, moving to those who remember the day. Now that I think of it, a single candle would be a moving monument to that day, to those who remember  it.

      Rambling is a survival skill to the dwindling band of us whose jobs involve filling space in newspapers. But in life, it's good to sometimes just sit and watch the river go by, particularly in good company. I would steal glances in his direction. The same face as when he was a toddler, now trim and angular and bearded. But the same contours, the same blue eyes. I tried not to speak, and generally succeeded.