Boats Against The Current

In the winter, when the trees that line the back of my apartment complex's yard are bare, I can see through them over Schmidt Field, into downtown to the right, over the Ohio River and straight into Kentucky in the middle.

I can make out the barges and river boats that slide by. Though I can't see the docks, at night I can see the lights at the end of some of them twinkling in the dark.

One of those lights, straight across from my balcony, is green.

"Like the green light at the end of Daisy's dock," I say when I take people outside onto my balcony in the dark. "Downtown is to the right, but straight across is the green light."

I say this as though it has meaning, but what meaning, I'm not sure.

There are probably a million essays and term papers and books written about the symbolism of that green light in the Great Gatsby. I don't have any ideas one way or the other about what Fitzgerald was saying, but I appreciate that he gives me something to think about whenever I look across the Ohio River from my back door.

In college, in Professor Habich's American literature survery course, I read the Great Gatsby for the second time. I can't think of Daisy's Dock without thinking of him and our discussions of Gatsby's outstretched arms, reaching toward that green light. Gatsby may have lived in West Egg in the Roaring Twenties, but whenever I see the green light on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, I imagine I am seeing what he saw.

I'm moving tomorrow. My winters of imagining Daisy's dock and Gatsby's longing for it will be gone. No matter. There will be another green light, a new allusion to hang my reveries on.

I'm looking forward to it.