Malouf

"This high feeling is what it is like to float in time, I tell myself; beyond the limits, beyond the flesh. I reach out and my fingers find a papery dryness. It has the texture of bark and my fingertips see through it into the earth; so that when, quite casually, my grandfather lays his hand on my head and says "Thank you boy," I feel the occasion open to include vast stretches of time, the future as well as the past, in which we in our generations are very small, though not unimportant, and a deep contentment comes over me, as of being and belonging just where I am. It is final. It is also a beginning. I am seated once again at the end of Grandpa's bed, curled up hard against the rails. I do not look up from my book, but his breath fills the spaces of it, and I hear him, very softly, call my name; hear it quite distinctly in his still-familiar voice - the moment is open again. It is as if it had taken all this time - thirty years - for the sound to travel the length of the bed and reach me; as you hear a word spoken sometimes and fail to catch its sense and then later, thirty years later, you hear it clearer and do."


January 21, 1999