Where I’m Writing From eli.cranor@gmail.com October 9, 2022 Eli Cranor is an Arkansas novelist whose debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is available wherever books are sold. He can be reached using the “Contact” page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor

I’m writing from the shade of my favorite tree.

It’s an old oak tree down near the bank behind our house. Bald eagles land in it sometimes. Maybe it’s their favorite tree too. I wonder if they notice the leaves falling from the branches.

I never did.

Not until I caught my dad running circles in our driveway a few years back.

I thought maybe he’d gone crazy. Maybe all those Diet Cokes had finally gone to his head. But, no, it wasn’t the aspartame. There was another kind of transformation going on inside my father.

He’d just recently become a grandfather, and the shift in titles had started softening him in ways I’d thought previously impossible.

Growing up, my dad was the toughest man I knew. He was a runner, a triathlete who competed in an Iron Man before I could walk. He was never the tallest or strongest dad on the block, but my old man sure was gritty.

Which was why it shocked me to see him flailing around in the driveway that day. The kids weren’t around, he wasn’t playing with them, but they were to blame.

Something inside my father loosened when he went from “Dad” to “DD,” the name my children call him now. All those hard, gristly fibers started wearing away, turning a former Iron Man to mush.

I watched him darting left to right across the front drive for a few more moments, before finally saying, “Hey, Dad? What are you doing?”

“Trying to catch these leaves, son.”

There it was, the gruffness I remembered so well, gone the moment he finally snagged one of the falling leaves.

Dad looked down at the leaf then up at me. His eyes were wet. I couldn’t believe it. My dad was crying. There were real tears in his eyes as he said, “A leaf only falls once, son. You ever thought about that?”

I hadn’t, not until right then, but now I think about leaves every October. Whenever I see a leaf fall, I think of my father, which is what I’m doing now, sitting under that oak tree the eagles like so much.

I’m watching for movement, that quick rattle when a leaf finally lets go of the limb. When it takes its one wild ride down through wispy blue sky and lands in the lake, the ocean, the gutter, or maybe my father’s wrinkled but still capable hands.

Watching the leaves, I can’t help but ponder life. Death will do that to you, and fall is nothing if not a stealthy simulacrum of impermanence. Fall also happens to be my favorite season. For the longest time, I thought my infatuation with Halloween was to blame, but I was wrong.

I love fall because it reminds me I’m alive. The leaves remind me. The grass does too, turning from green to tawny-brown. Fall reminds me of time and the plans time has for all of us. Here’s how Bill Shakespeare put it: “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate-- /That Time will come and take my love away.”

That’s from Sonnet 64. Johnny Wink has every one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets noodling around in his noggin. Ask him to recite a line — any line, from any sonnet — and he’ll tell it to you. But if you ask him to say Sonnet 64, there will be tears behind Johnny Wink’s Coke-bottle glasses.

Just like there were tears in my father’s eyes that day in the driveway. Just like there are tears in my eyes now as I watch leaves fall from my favorite tree. I don’t stand. I don’t go chasing after them like my father did, but I am trying to catch them. Every word I write is an outstretched hand, a net cast wide, fighting to keep those leaves — my father, my heart friend, all those I hold dear — from ever touching the ground.

I know better, though.

Shakespeare knew it too. Even if our words outlive us, there’s an end to all things, you, me, Dad and Johnny Wink included. And that’s okay. It’s all right. In fact, that’s precisely what makes life worth living.