On Walking by the Lake

I have always lived near water. It’s one of the very few constants in my life. There’s something about the push and pull, the rise and fall, the never ending movement that feels right to me, in a way I’ve never been able to explain.

I grew up on the Mississippi River. Watched the lock and dam do their work to let the enormous  barges float by. Meandering along the river bank with my friends in high school (but never swimming in it because - gross). We’d walk down after rehearsals at the hundred-year-old theater where we spent most of the summer. Preparing for the lives we were sure we would spend singing and dancing and making people happy. 

I was comforted by the knowledge that when I was starring on Broadway, water would keep flowing past the spot where I sat. It would keep making its long journey down the length of this land, growing wider and deeper with every mile until it finally poured out into the ocean, free of the banks that had held it in check. 

It made me feel part of something epic. Like my destiny was just waiting for me and all I had to do was go find it, grab on and hold tight. 

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In college, I was a slightly longer drive from the water, but Lake Michigan was close enough for an afternoon trip from Kalamazoo. We would all cram ourselves into someone’s beat up car and spend the day talking and reading in those blissful days before any of our phones did anything except call each other to ask, “Wanna hang out?” I would slather myself in sunscreen and still turn pink while my friends would fuss about tan lines. 

And we would play music for each other on our ipods – Oh my God just listen to this. Have you ever heard anything more beautiful? –  recordings of renowned choirs and opera singers we burned from the music library and then imported onto our thick laptops and then downloaded onto this new device we could carry around and have music all the time. We would plan the recitals we’d sing someday, fantasize about the roles we’d play. We would dream about the stages we’d stand on and all the grand things we would do.

Everything seemed possible, in those moments, while I watched the waves crash onto the sand and then retreat, and then come towards us once again.

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My first ‘real’ job was outside DC and the ocean redefined the word vast for me. My friend and I spent summer days at the inner harbor in Baltimore, eating seafood literally caught that morning and planning the course of the rest of our lives. Which now makes me smile in that ‘oh to be young and foolish’ way because of course we didn’t know anything. Neither of us are still working in the fields we were going to completely transform back then. 

But I remember watching the glimmer of the sun off the water and thinking about how — a century earlier — my great-grandmother had packed a trunk and crossed this same ocean, alone. How she’d come here searching for something, a better life, though I wasn’t sure anymore what that meant. 

I let my feet sink deeper into the shore and wondered what it would feel like to go back to where she lived. If viewing this same ocean from the other side would feel like coming home. 

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This morning I went for a walk along Lake Michigan, my old friend. I live on the other side, now. Of the lake. Of a career. Of a life, it seems sometimes. 

Every year my neighborhood repaints the concrete benches that line the path. Families and businesses and organizations put their hopes on full display. Every year the path is born anew, but every year it is also the same. The same view, the same water, the same smell that will always feel to me like freedom and possibility. 

Underneath this year’s paintings are last year’s, and the year before, and the year before that. Generations of dreams, of repeated cries to just love each other, to just love the earth. And for ten years I have walked this same path along the water, watched the children grow up, watched the wild grass grow. For ten years I have leaned against the rail and gazed at the skyline that has become home. 

My life is completely different than I imagined when I skipped rocks into the Mississippi, when I lounged by the ocean, when I laughed out loud on the other side of the lake.

But somehow, it’s also the same. I’m the same. The layers of who I’ve been still live underneath. 

And so even though everything is hard and exhausting and frightening and disheartening and sad,

I breath in the scent of the water, and I match my breath to the sound of the waves, and I watch the sun glimmer against the blue that stretches toward the horizon,

And I dream.