Louis Roney: Lakeside musings

We live on a lake. It is not the biggest lake. It’s not the smallest lake. It is just “our lake.” For 35 years this conspicuous puddle has brought us sunrises that lead to good days, many of them more than good.

B.w. and I have found much happiness in this uncomplicated setting, a setting that is imbued with my premature thanks when I look at it as the scene of whatever else good is in store for us in our future. For many years I was an operatic tenor on many American and European stages, and I never failed before curtain-rising to stroll about the empty stage and to locate just where it was that we were to “bring to life” our romantic drama, what props were there and ready for us to utilize.

The “play” of my life is now in its final act. I would like it to be a good act, an act of peace and harmony, but one of courage also. It should be an act in which to give thanks to all the people and things that have let me reach whatever heights I’ve reached. I don’t believe that one should live in the past, but successful past times have a way of generating a climate where good things can logically and comfortably reoccur and thrive. B.w. and I have, ourselves, created most of the good things we have enjoyed. And the pattern is there for another giving, another drama of human desire and fulfillment. It has always been my belief that the “getting” is not the pleasure, but rather, it is the “getting there” — the trip— that converts pleasant dreams into smiling reality.

The times before b.w. and I had ever crossed our little lake and had only looked at its far side tugged at us, until our curiosity was satisfied and our feet were on the far shore. Bare feet in the water whenever possible, we walked around the lakeside.

In “Walden Pond” when Thoreau said, “I have traveled far in Concord,” I believe he was referring to the meticulous care with which he acquainted himself with every leaf and blade of grass along the way. He was telling us that he hadn’t missed a trick. And missed-tricks are too expensive for the curious to afford. It’s hard to recall perhaps that one’s mate and partner in life was once a stranger, across a room, a street, or a continent. Lying next to each other, we may suddenly realize that we had to shove a continent aside to be together.

From my early college days in New England, I remember these words: “Let us now be up and doing.” I remember my Georgia genesis where cotton was grown, picked, and made into huge bales. As I grew into manhood, I changed geographies and Cottons — and my new Cotton (Mather) put words in motion that urged me to get off my behind and “be up and doing.” I think that no American has fully explored his birthright until he acquaints himself with New England, where so much of our character, history, and literature came into being. Early in my Cambridge days, I got in my old Pontiac and drove out to Lexington and Concord to see why Emerson’s

1837 “Concord Hymn” had rattled in my Confederate skull until I knew instinctively where it came from and what it was saying to me. I stood in the middle of that “rude bridge that arched the flood” where “they” stood, “their flag to April’s breeze unfurled here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” That shot was fired straight at me too. My ancestors came up from Georgia to combat the Albion foe.

Ours is a big country with a big past, one big enough to hold all of us from everywhere to be part of what is America now. One of my Eliot House roommates, Charlie from Ohio, never tired of kidding me about my rude “Georgia roots.” He never missed a chance to insert a few sophomoric digs about “Georgia womanhood.” To the end, I never revealed to him my limited experience in such things — else all of his ability to be my “observant tormentor” would have vanished. Charlie, an excellent amateur pianist, was more than a bit overweight, and many of us wondered when he would ever get himself into that shape which leads men to success in attracting women.

He succeeded in both, and years later I rejoiced to see him at a class reunion where he grilled me about singing opera in Italy, Germany and France. Charlie went home to Ohio soon after our reunion, walked into the local post office to get his mail, and dropped dead of a heart attack. Do we ever consider the full implications of the words “good bye”(God be with ye) when we say them to a friend whom we hope and expect to see again in the near future?