Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you.
While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.
Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.
The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions – everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.
And even you, then, will wonder how you have such hope, and marvel at how impossible it is to stop the heart from reaching out into the whole world.
Being agreeable didn’t make people less difficult.
The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink – this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He’d survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they’d just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.
A gift was what another person thought of you, and over the years he’d come to understand, by consensus, that his children saw him as someone who wore a tie to work, used power tools, played golf and drank scotch, which, while all true, seemed a superficial view of him. And yet when asked directly, he couldn’t say what he wanted. Nothing.
Getting sentimental,” you say, but who are you fooling, you’ve always been.
If all of this has taught you anything, it’s that hope is easier to get rid of than sorrow.
Damn straight I’m lucky, I thought. I’m a Red Sox fan.
These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer – all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.
You’re proud of your ability to both believe and question everything. Secretly you think everyone does, but at some point they give in, surrender to the comfort of certainty. It’s too much trouble, this endless jousting of belief and doubt, too tiring. Finally you suppose it will break you, yet strangely it’s the only thing that keeps you going – though, true, at times you feel unbalanced, even somewhat mad.
It’s as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart.
While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn’t the fastest or smartest or best at everything.
Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it’s a secret of your profession, one people don’t want to know.
Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you’ve only just opened your eyes.
In Heaven you forget everything. In Hell they make you remember.
There’s nothing to do. You’ve been in the business long enough to understand grief. That’s the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don’t want to, you don’t want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death’s taught you that much at least.
It frightens you how practical you can be, how cold, even with your own.
Success to him meant having the time to do nothing.