The Road We Live On
fiction by Robin Lippincott
Most of us who live along this winding, hilly country road have been here for a long time, or our families have. And so of course just about everybody knows everybody else.
One afternoon back when spring was first blooming we were out walking and one of us pointed to the backboard and basketball hoop that Oscar and Dorothy Munroe put up for their son Benji over fifty years ago. It’s still there at the back of the house, facing the woods but briefly visible from the road as you’re passing by. That asphalt court they laid down, now faded and cracked, looks so out of place amid the bountiful surround of green. Oscar and Dot eventually had Anne and Emily too, but only Benji played basketball, sometimes with his Dad. All three Munroe kids are grown and gone now, having moved out of state, with families of their own.
A few weeks ago, we ran into Dot out in front of her and Oscar’s house, where the yard meets the road; as it was a weekday, Oscar would have been at work. During our brief chat, Dot mentioned twice that she had been a schoolteacher before retiring, as if we didn’t already know. She also talked, somewhat obsessively, about the dangers of the traffic on our road and how some folks drive too fast; and yet at the same time she seemed almost to flirt with stepping out into and then back off the road. As spring hardened into summer, news came that Dot had been diagnosed with dementia and would need a caregiver on weekdays so that Oscar, who’s somewhere in his mid-to-late 70s and one of the kindest men you’ll ever meet, can continue going to work at the garage full-time, as he’s done for over fifty years.
We notice that backboard every time we walk past the house now and can’t help but take it in, weathered and splintered, the wood rotting, the net in tatters, just a few hanging strings remain. It seems to represent time itself, its inexorability, and it makes us feel so very battered and sad, not only for the Munroe family but for all of us who live along this road.
Robin Lippincott is the author of six books, most recently Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell. Other books are Rufus + Syd, a YA novel co-written with Julia Watts, the novels In the Meantime, Our Arcadia, and Mr. Dalloway, as well as the story collection The ‘I’ Rejected. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in more than thirty journals, including The Paris Review, Fence, American Short Fiction, and The New York Times Book Review, and has been anthologized in Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity in the South, M2M: New Literary Fiction, and Rebel Yell. In addition, he has received multiple fellowships from Yaddo and also the MacDowell Colony. Robin teaches in the MFA Program of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, and lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.