I am convinced that it will not be so much the big things that we will recall as we die – not the grand pleasures, the colossal mistakes, the wringing regrets; not the births, the deaths, the marriages, the divorces; neither the accolades nor the stinging rebukes; not the triumph of dreams realized nor the desolation of brutal failure. It will not be the drama of beginnings and endings of grand love affairs, the jobs won and lost, nor the fortunes gained and squandered, that we will remember.
Rather, it will be the small things and moments, the nearly imperceptible things that get inside us and become part of us. It will be a father’s whistling, as he stands in shirtsleeves in the kitchen, turning over bacon in the pan. The tune is Twilight Time and the smell of bacon is sweet and clinging. It will be the tinkling of ice in the glass, the sound of the liquid pouring over it and the cubes cracking as the alcohol hits them: a mother’s first sip of the night and the sigh of satisfaction.
We will remember the cold rain on the face and running down a ten-year-old neck, inside the collar, as we trudge home under gray skies, with fishing pole in one hand, and a string of perch and pickerel in the other, working our way in the fall rain toward the doorway that will open into yellow light and warmth of inside.
It will be the call of the loon on a fall afternoon on Lake Temagami, when the lake is still, and there is no one else for miles, just the pines standing tall on the islands at the moment when the paddle breaks from the water and a solitary flake of snow, the first of the impending winter, falls and lands on a wrist.
It will be the moment of the brush of a lover’s lips, and her breath, on a cheek, and the small delicate spaces of delusion and desire between one touch and the next, and the one after that, the moment before she leaves.
It will be the look – between question and delight – of a red-haired daughter in her green flannel nightgown, as she peeks up from the floor, caught in the middle of a private joke shared between her and the ragged little doll that she clutches as though it were a new-born.
It will be that moment years later in Upstate, mid-August, when the sun is still hot, beating down on the corn which stands high in the field sprawling beneath the eternal blue sky, the moment when the crickets sing, the solitary raven calls, and the sun is burning that spot on your face that will later turn into something, and we realize with a shiver that – just now – the season has shifted beyond ripeness, and is now moving to decay, and so are we, and all the earth is trembling in its precariousness.
We will remember the frozen seconds, those moments when the cosmic crack opens just so, when a microscopic fracture appears in this beautiful and catastrophic illusion, when the earth and we shift ever so slightly off-kilter and everything is absolutely still and we realize that it is all a perfect disaster, just as it is.
– From We Never Say Goodbye (unpublished), copyright © Peter Scott Cameron, 2016.