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A Body Floating in the River
On life-changing adolescent experiences
I was thirteen the first time I saw a dead body.
I do not mean in the sense that my mom walked me up to the casket in a flower-scented funeral home in my navy blue suit coat to say goodbye to my grandfather; Nor do I mean that my life was plagued by wakes and funerals beginning at an early age.
His name was Peter Briggs. He was a 47-year-old homeless man. I didn’t know him, but my friend Cara and I found his lifeless body floating in the river behind my house on the first day of summer vacation in 1995.
We tend to remember summer vacation with a certain wistfulness. My generation was amongst the last to spend the entirety of our childhood and teenage years without a computer or cell phone (We had a computer for school work and my first cell phone was a gift for my 19th birthday, though I can remember using it solely to call my parents from college). A computer and cellphone-free summer sounds unconscionable, but we really didn’t know any differently. The days, in our memories, always began early — and, in my case, on a bike — and the sky was always that perfect azure blue and cumulus cloud dotted the sky.
His name was Peter Briggs. He was a 47-year-old homeless man. I didn’t know him, but my friend Cara and I found his lifeless body floating in the river behind my house on the first day of summer vacation in 1995.
Memories are funny like that.
My neighborhood was a collection of houses on a small street with virtually zero through traffic. Our doors were always unlocked. Everyone who drove by was someone we knew. Most of the kids ages ranged within a decade of one another, so we formed natural cliques and friendships based on age and, of course, which family had a pool. We played street hockey and basketball by day. At night, we played a game of hide-and-seek in the dark which we called, “Relievio,” a name that has no origin story.
The house in which I grew up abutted a small river, a tributary to the Merrimack River, which, in turn leads to the ocean. It was, and still is, a relatively quiet…
