Robert Flournoy--A Road Not Taken

I A Road Not Taken
I went to high school in Virginia. My dad, a career army officer, was stationed at Ft Monroe where he and my mom bought a house they really could not afford. It was on a canal just down the beach that connected to the Chesapeake Bay. Our little neighborhood had a sea wall of stone where docks for boats of various sizes could be seen behind every home. Ours was a 15' outboard (40 HP Johnson) that served us well to fish and water ski.

Summers were magical. With a thousand acres of marsh across the canal in which we crabbed and hunted ducks, a white sand beach 100 yards down the road, and the canal a pathway to open water a short boat ride away, we didn't appreciate the paradise that we lived in, Bronson, Steve, and I.

And there was Suzanne, our lanky blond quick witted friend who was our neighbor and frequent companion who we tried to make just one of the boys. A tom boy herself, she was a game sharer of off color jokes, and general goofing around. She also wore a lime green string bikini that seemed to grow smaller as we all trudged our way through awkward adolescence and puberty. She was an integral part of our moment in paradise. It would not have been the same without her. We were sixteen years old.

We knew most of our neighbors, but never became acquainted with an old Irishman who kept to himself, and fished daily in his larger boat, the Tin Can. He liked his cups, and a large black cat, who was often seen riding unsteadily on his shoulder as he wobbled down to his boat, often singing loudly.  Looking back, I regret that I did not just knock on his door, and get to know him, perhaps offering some needed company. Or he might have said, "go away", although that would have contradicted the human condition that calls to us all, a lonely spot in our hearts that needs attending.

But, I didn't knock, and he remained an enigma, although out of the blue one day he said, "hello Bob". How he knew my name I do not know, but it reinforced my later regrets that I did not assuage the possibility that he might have yearned for some human contact. He seemed old at the time, but that could have been sixty, which is indeed old to a sixteen year old who was somewhat lonely, too. I wish I could do that part of my life again.

The things that I could have learned from that old man. But, he would eventually become the teacher of things sublime in my own old age, where I became a little wiser and more contemplative of the roads I had chosen, or those whose call I had ignored.

In world war one,  the Irish Ulster Brigade lost 35,000 men, while back in Ireland the British, for whom they were fighting, were executing Irishmen who resisted British rule. In 1917, Irish lads of seventeen and eighteen were dying in the trenches of Flanders Field, the Meuse, and the Argonne Forest. Due to the oppressive and often brutal treatment of their brethren back home, many Irish soldiers immigrated to the United States, often mingling with American soldiers on troop ships whose logs, due to the confusion of a million men trying to get home, knew no difference between American soldiers and others who spoke the language.

Still pariahs, and unwelcome in the Brahman cities of northeastern America just as they had been for over a hundred years, these Irishmen drifted west and south into the Appalachian states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas.  Navy veterans tended to settle on the coasts of the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic seaboard, finding work that suited the trades they had learned from their time in the service. Newport News, a short ride from my home in Hampton,  was one of the nation's largest ship building facilities during world war two, and many Irish ex sailors found careers there.

I found a name in an obscure internet obituary, buried in a timeless newspaper from County Mayo, Ireland.  In 1919, a Colleen McGaragile, daughter of Sean and Sandra, had died from unspecified causes at the age of nineteen survived by a twin brother Sean.  But what of the ensuing years? An exhaustive search revealed that a Sean McGaragile, United States Navy, had been discharged in New Port News, Virginia in August of 1946 The trail went cold after that until I found his obit, buried in the archives of the local newspaper.

I searched for further mention of Mr McGaragile on the internet, coming up finally with his obituary, which stated that he had been preceded in death by a daughter and wife, both having died young. A gut punch, reinforcing my regrets. Bronson, and Steve, who lived on either side of me, three house down from Mr McGaragile, would be dead in a few years. Marines who had rushed to the call in 1965. They would have grown into kindness, missing an old man, just like I was. It is a sobering thought to realize that I am probably the only human being still alive who remembers that old man. Suzanne might, but she too is lost in time, a foggy memory that makes me smile, and squirm a bit.

Photo courtesy of the author.

   Although I have not been back to that neighborhood for many years, I do know that there is no remnant of any family that lived there when I did. The houses of Bronson and Steve, my childhood friends, have no memory of the laughing boys that ran through their halls so long ago.

Google earth shows Mr McGaragile's house as I remember, but the dock and boat are gone. Every other house on the block have both. But, none have what appears to be the shadow of a small animal that seems to be sitting on the sea wall, gazing quietly out to sea. Or so it seemed.

The obit for Mr McGaragile was short, and impersonal, merely stating that a Sean McGaragile, a Hampton, Virginia resident since 1946, had passed away in 1999 at a local nursing home at the age of 99 years. He was a veteran of WW1 and WW2. In WW1 he had served in the British navy, in WW2 he was with the U.S. navy, a survivor of the battle of the Coral Sea.  There were no surviving family members, and I have been unable to find his burial site, but he did have a cat by his side when he passed, Seawall III

The first time I saw him
the sun was going down.
he asked us why we were up so early
Bronson and me.
he was walking, unsteady,
down to his boat, headed out to sea.
we smiled at that old man,
a tipster who lived on our canal,
we merely let him be.
I would have to grow old, too,
to one day understand,
that he was lonely, sad,
and old, you see,
just like me.
(Bob Flournoy, 2025)

“Old men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.”

― William Butler Yeats

Photo courtesy of the author.