Dan’s Gone, Too, Now

by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

Dan’s gone, too, now. He was fishing in a river and was washed away when he didn’t hear the siren announcing that the gates of a nearby dam had opened. Anything can happen in Vermont. It was years ago, but I had never googled him before, probably because in my mind he belonged, like my father, to a time before search engines. For no good reason, except that I had thought of it, I was playing the game, who’s dead, who’s still alive. His result was the one that affected me the most; even more than finding out that the former beat cop on Church Street, although not dead, had at least been disgraced. I only met Dan once, in the homeless shelter, but what he said to me, recalling the times he had kept my father company on his bench on Church Street after he had been banned from the shelter during the coldest winter on record, changed my life forever: “That was a meltdown that I as a human being was not prepared to watch. If I’d known that you existed, I woulda dropped in a dime and called you up.” I have never forgotten his words and I have never stopped thinking about how everything would have been different if he had. Those twenty minutes we spent talking back in the winter of ’96 have meant more to me than most of the relationships I have had in my life. Rest in peace, Dan, wherever you are.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning disabled author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. Nathaniel has forthcoming/recently published poems, stories, and essays with X-R-A-Y, North Dakota Quarterly, Citron Review, Reed Magazine, Epiphany, Permafrost, Berkeley Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Breakwater Review and DIAGRAM. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. www.NathanielLachenmeyer.com