We live on the banks of the Saint Lawrence. A modest home, clapboard, white-washed, much like the ones you see in old pictures of farm-houses. It has a wrap-around porch out in the back where our home faces the river. We sit on the porch in the evenings after supper and watch the tugs go by as they pull barges loaded with various sundries to ports named after saints. Other boats go by as well. Some very large. Some look like toys out there so all alone, so tiny set against the vastness of the Saint.

As a child I’d hope that they would reach their destinations okay—some didn’t. Of those we’d hear about when we’d go into town in the mornings. I’d go with my father down to the hardware store and sit on the steps out in front listening to the men tell stories of those that didn’t. Although I never knew those aboard those ill-fated boats, I still felt like a piece of me went with them. That part of me, I guess, that might have seen them go by my porch. That part of me that I’d imagine went with them. I’d listen always with a sense of wonder about the Saint.

As I ruminate upon this, I believe it was what the river implied—to myself, I mean, and perhaps to others who live upon its shores—considering the almost reverent way people speak about the Saint, that it’s a living, breathing, omnipotence. And that can be aroused to anger, like some wronged deity. Don’t we all, to some extent, believe in deities and such which we’ll never comprehend? And doesn’t this sort of make-believe foster the motivation to cross thresholds, and I don’t necessarily mean the empirical. No.

The Saint, as it is always referred to by us, was very much a part of me, ingrained you might say, and even after all these years . . .  But, you know, I never really thought of it like that then, it was always—well, it was always just there, like snow in the winter, the midsummer rains, time flowing like a river ever passing, never past.

The Saint lulls me to sleep each night, what with the dissonant sounds of fog-horns. Their wailings are somehow soothing to hear — many say the same. Probably it’s meant to sound that way, to provide a bridge, you might say, one constructed from the rudiments of hope to those caught within the fog which can suddenly and surreptitiously creep across the back of the Saint. I think sometimes of that biblical phrase, “the rain falls upon the just and the unjust” and wonder, if this is what is meant by saint.

Our home borders the river and also faces the east. So each morning when I step out onto the porch I’m dazzled by the rising sun and the millions of chards of broken glass-like light which illuminates the Saint, seems like nature paying homage. You know, I felt special back then, and do still, like I had something then that no one else did—except us of course, us river people. We live on the edge, the border, a threshold you might say. There is a foreign country just the other side you know, and as a child, on a clear day, with the use of my father’s binoculars, I could even see it. I’d smile inwardly, that warm joy, as I’d think that when I got older I could journey across this river, if I chose to. So you see, I did have something then that others didn’t, and still do as well—ever passing, never past?

You know, I never did choose to cross. I knew then that someday I could, and that is what I had, what I knew, what I owned. Even though all this was a long, long, time ago, the years, like tugs on the Saint Lawrence, still pass like determined hopes with destinations that will always remain undestined, never reached, those Elsewheres of Sufism that will always exist just beyond the veil of a mist, destinations to ports with reverential names. Still, as then, I feel as though I have something, something of an inheritance, something like no other’s and it lies mysteriously just across this vastness, yet it’s right here right next to me, in fact, and I see this in the mirrored refection that illuminates the wonder in the eyes of my son as we both sit and watch the ships go by from the porch in the back of our home on the back of the Saint.

C. Angelo Caci's bio, or portrait of the artist, would best be conveyed in a literary still life: laptop with reading lamp clamped to the lid, a Merlot in a cut glass stemmed goblet, a pack of Garcia Vegas or Grenadiers, and a pair of reading glasses set on its lenses with one obtrusive stem sticking hard on and readied . . .