his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping.
He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends.
All of them could sit on their heels into their old age, and they'd do it by prefer49
ence, as if they had a grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church still
waiting to judge the angels. There was one old fellow whose blessing and baptizing hand had a twist burned into it because he had taken hold of a young Jayhawker's gun by the barrel. 'I thought, That child doesn't want to shoot me,' he would say. 'He was five years shy of a whisker. He should have been home with his mama. So I said, 'Just give me that thing,' and he did, grinning a little as he did it. I couldn't drop the gun I thought that might be the joke—and I couldn't shift it to the other hand because that arm was in a sling. So I just walked off with it.'
They had been to Lane and Oberlin, and they knew their Hebrew and their Greek and their Locke and their Milton. Some of them even set up a nice little college in Tabor. It lasted quite a while. The people who graduated from it, especially the young women, would go by themselves to the other
side of the earth as teachers and missionaries and come back decades later to tell us about Turkey and Korea. Still, they were bodacious old men, the lot of them. It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, 'I could show you how to do that.' She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, 'Why'd you have to be so damn old?'
I ask myself the same question. 50
A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she's made it
very pretty, too. She's a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the
blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn't know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I'd act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you'd laugh and laugh and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, 'No, you don't, there wasn't any bee!' and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe
there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, 'I want you to do this.' And then you put
your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, 'Now sip.' You said, 'You have
to take your medicine.' So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed
to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation.
I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour
old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar. Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to 5 1
the sidewalk. You remember Soapy. I don't really know why you should. She is a very unremarkable animal. I'll take a picture of her.
So there we were, sipping honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother brought out the camera, so maybe you will have some pictures. The film ran out before I could get a shot of her. That's just typical. Sometimes if I try to photograph her she'll hide her face in her hands, or she'll just walk out of the room. She doesn't think she's a pretty woman. I don't know where she got these ideas about herself, and I don't think I ever will know, either.
Sometimes I've wondered why she'd marry an old man like me, a fine, vital woman like she is. I'd never have thought to ask her to marry me. I would never have dared to. It was her idea. I remind myself of that often. She reminds me of it, too.
I'd never have believed I'd see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've
done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
There's a shimmer on a child's hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams ofjust the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They're in the petals of flowers, and they're on a child's skin. Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you're not prettier than
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most children. You're just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the
most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I'm about to put on imperishability.
In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing
in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact.
While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more
