Precious Time

This Week's Song - Precious Time by Van Morrison. Van's voice is ear candy.You cannot help dancing to and/or feeling uplifted by the basic lesson held in its lyrics. Try it out and take to heart the message in the words, but make sure the furniture is out of the way and your girl/guy is within arms reach. I've danced some great swings with beautiful women to this one.

The Author and The Coleman
 July 3, 2014
Fripp Island, South Carolina

The glorious bridges of Beaufort County, South Carolina, traversing miles of lush, undisturbed marshland, delivered us to the shore of Fripp Island this past week for the annual Ackermann family vacation. On Thursday morning I sat in a beach chair watching the back end of Hurricane Arthur out on the salt as it moved north and away from our island, sparing our final days in a magical place. It was my time for reflecting on the enormity of my good fortune to be among the Ackermann family. For the past 12 years the Ackermann children (Dori, Nancy, Andy and Jill) have gathered beside a large body of water with their spouses, children and parents to enjoy a week of sun, water, laughs, and love.  In recent years, as the children age, we are sometimes without one or two. This year we had the full lot - 22. In 2002, my young children and I were graciously invited to enlarge the group by virtue of my exquisite and easy decision to marry Bert and Judy Ackermann's second-born child, Nancy. It is always a wonderful week. It is also time to renew my intimate relationship with a gray Coleman cooler.

Before me and before the trip became an annual event, Andy Ackermann walked into a Galyon's in Atlanta in September of 2000. She sat among those other brands of coolers in a display, poised like an orphan, waiting for a prospective and loving parent to pick her from the others. She was a bland gray among much sexier and higher priced competitors, but fate was to intervene that Fall afternoon as my future brother-in-law was on a mission to find a cooler for a Tennessee-Georgia tailgate party in Athens. Red wasn't an option. Orange was no where to be seen. A price-efficient-nondescript-basic Coleman seemed to do. Destiny was set in motion. In the last 14 years, the gray Coleman has seen tailgate parties, neighborhood functions, family reunions and a myriad of other celebrations and happy occasions, but it is that one week in July every year where she is put to the full test of service and where my loving relationship with her is annually renewed. I met her in 2003 when my arms were stronger and my hair darker. Since I was the new kid on the block, I took it upon myself to fill her up and get her to the beach, a task of strategic planning and hard physical labor. The rest is history. Each and every morning she waits patiently for me to remove yesterday's sand, empty cans, and bottle labels from the two inches of warm water sloshing on her floor to clean her anew, fill her with beer, water, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew and other beverages so that we may escort each other on the long walk to the beach. Down boardwalks, through sand, along gravel paths, and across lagoons I've dragged, carried, floated and pushed her to a place beneath a tent where she sits contently in the shade watching this extraordinary family age, serving as silent witness to the precious time slipping away. Despite the abundance of men, young and old, I rarely relinquish control of the glorious task and always take offense when she holds the hand of another. I'm a jealous man. The right of passage has become ritual and worship. I know she is smiling along with me as we go. She has been there for it all. Boys who wore life jackets and drank from juice boxes now have facial hair and jobs. Girls who wore swimmies and said, "look at this shell Daddy," wear headphones and talk of college orientation and sorority rush. If you think about it long enough it will break your heart. The gray Coleman continues to serve us through it all, even now as we curse, accept, and brace ourselves for the escalating effects of a terrible disease that steals memories, the memories we have worked so hard to cultivate, from our sweet JuJu. Judy has Alzheimer's disease.

The unconditional and unrestrained love of this family for its matriarch was on full display on the windswept- low-country island this week. The children care daily for their ailing mother at home and, of course, on this trip, but the entire family's devotion to this wonderful lady this past week stands as a testament to what true love is. It is patient, it is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast and it is not proud. This includes the love of grandchildren. They are committed to her, asking their JuJu if he/she is her favorite, playing along with her to Family Feud, getting her beloved Sprite and peanut butter, and quizzing her about her youth, those precious memories that will be the last to go.  Then there is the love of the man from whom she has been divorced over 30 years. Bert and Judy divorced in the early 80's. Since that time, life has continued to throw them together - birthdays, weddings, births, holidays, and, yes, vacations. He has been twice more married and divorced, but his love for his family has not wavered, and his love for her has never been so obvious. It is not the passionate love of youth or courtship, the constant, the dutiful or reverent love of a middle-age, or the familiar feelings and companionship of decades of marriage, but make no mistake about it - it is love. He walked her to the beach, he made her lunch, he retrieved her blanket, he searched for "Everybody Loves Raymond," her favorite show. They do not share a home or a life together, but the strength of once-upon-a-time, cultivated and sprinkled with the magic of what and who they created together, is enough. It is enough. On Friday, she and I sat beneath the tent with the gray Coleman and sang along with the ipod. We sang with Charlie Pride and Charlie Rich. We swayed with the Shirelles and Elvis Presley. Without accompanying music she offered up a rendition of "Sweet Caroline," with the youngest grandchild, Lauren Turner, who giggled and sang along. When I hit play on the playlist I made especially for her, Connie Francis's "Lipstick on your Collar," bled onto the sand from the speakers, bringing the voices of each Ackermann child to join in, the lyrics ingrained in their memory from evenings long ago, dancing and singing along as children in the family kitchen. Not one of them can sing a lick, but the sound is as beautiful as any Hallelujah Chorus ever heard. Precious time is slipping away.

Author, Nancy, and JuJu
July 3, 2014

I know as well as any the frailty of life and the precarious nature of our existence. I suppose that is why I know, at least most of the time, when to allow myself to fall into moments of this life that hold simplistic beauty. Those moments are easy to miss if you don't "get it." Unfortunately, the gift comes with great sacrifice, for it is a gift born of death and grief and love and one which cannot be taught or simply given to another. In the wake of my worst time on this planet, a friend told me with a wink and a smile "No one will acknowledge it, but not one of us is getting out of here alive." Van Morrison delivers the same message to the beat of a Carolina Shag. So, as I sat beneath the tent atop the gray Coleman on Thursday, listening to JuJu's and Connie's voice mix with the surf and the dysfunctional harmonies of the middle-aged Ackermann children, I smiled and turned the key, locking away another memory I will hold "till Hell freezes over and the rivers run dry," ever thankful for the precious time.