Yes, he reflected at the end of a wonderful day, Proust was surely right that through chance encounters with textures, shapes, colors, and smells, certain life objects call and awaken us to the dead elements of our past: the events, conflicts, victories and losses, the departed people with their voices and spoken words, their laughter and tears, gestures and silences, the departed liberated from oblivion and visiting with us before we ourselves pass on and retreat into our own inanimate past.
Here Ira was, well, alive and next to Hannah as he had lain for nearly fifty years, she asleep now for the last few hours, and he, not one to toss and turn, lying still and thinking about the joyful day with Hannah, his two children, their mates, and each with a toddler grandson at the children’s farm museum. A warm, sunny June day running after boys who were chasing after the chickens, ducks, turkeys, baby goats, and the cow barn with his holding up each of the boys to pat a cow, and there the smell of manure and that blink of memory.
Later, all of them together at their favorite local diner for dinner, the meal itself diner adequate, and the boys fairly well-behaved in their child seats, eating this, rejecting that, sauces smearing their faces, food droppings hitting the floor, a scream or two lifting surrounding brows toward them, and Hannah their defender, champion, and interpreter beguiled by them, and he beguiled by Hannah’s beguilement. And the manure...
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