Day of rest

I could write about stuff, on this Sunday morning.

I could write about the first Sunday in the NFL season and how players will kneel or link arms or stay in the locker room during the National Anthem, as they all did until about 10 years ago. And how people will boo that when they didn't before because the message -- racial inequality and what we should do about it -- is not one they believe is legitimate.

I could write about radio blowhole Skip Bayless saying something clueless on the air about Dak Prescott talking publicly about his struggles with depression, but Skippy-doo is always saying something clueless on the air so that's not exactly news.

I could write about the weirdness of seeing Notre Dame Stadium drained of almost all its Domer Nation. Or seeing the same thing at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee, Fla., home of Florida State. Or of Naomi Osaka wearing a mask with Tamir Rice's name on it to her U.S. Open final against Victoria Azarenka.

I'm not going to write about any of that.

Instead I'm going to write about my sister and I freezing our hindparts off in Lake Huron yesterday, because it was time to bring our parents home.

It was a gray day weeping drizzle and Lake Huron was gray, too, and rolling with big swells. And so we got soaked, my sister and I.

She fell down. I tottered around and almost fell down. The water, as you can imagine it would be on September 12, was steal-your-breath cold.

But we brought our parents home.

Mom died in 2013. Dad passed in 2018. We've had their ashes in storage since, and this weekend we carried them commingled in a square biodegradable box up to northern Michigan, where they lived for 25 years and where their hearts were and always will be. And a mile or so down from their lakefront home -- out in front of the house where Bob and Norma Carmin, their dearest friends in the world,  lived -- we waded out a few yards and let the lake take them.

Of course, it didn't go smoothly. We set the box loose, and it didn't sink nearly as well as we did. It kept bobbing among the swells, threatening to wash right back to the beach.

I blamed Mom, of course. She was always the stubborn one. 

Finally I waded back out, carried the box a few more yards out, and held it under the water. A small cloud of ash blossomed around it, and finally it sank out of sight.

I looked up at the sky. I looked out toward the horizon, where the ghost outline of a freighter was barely visible through the gloom. I thought about all the years my parents spent up here in this God's country, and how they loved it, and how there was no resting place they would have chosen except right here, in the gray roiled lake, with the freighters passing by out on the horizon, ghostly or sun-splashed or all lit up at night like some gaudy beacon.

And then I thought about what Mom and Dad must have been saying, watching their offspring wallow around in the icy water.

Mom: "Those two don't have the sense God gave a goose."

Dad: "Oh, good grief."

And then, along with their friends the Carmins, they'd all laugh fit to burst.

And somehow that seemed perfect, too.