In the Beginning

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Gabriel García Márquez, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

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Dear Kate,

So, there, the opening line of arguably the greatest work of inarguably one of the greatest men of letters.  What does it sound like?

It sounds like a beginning, from the perspective of an end.  In fact, the third sentence of the opening paragraph reads: "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

Genesis.

This is a new beginning, right now.  Say it with me: "Many years later, as I face the __________, I will remember the distant spring morning when __________."

Go ahead, fill in the blanks.

Try in the first "last appointment with my final specialist," "last fall off my bed," "last impression of myself in the mirror," "last well-wish of my favorite grandchild," "last recollection of my first memory, deepest regret, truest joy"...

Now we are dismayed, cursing in our heart this crown of thorns, a tyrant with a proper name, COVID in the Year Two Thousand and Nineteen (and who knows when her reign will end?).  Now.  But one day when we look back at the now, the beginning of our end, we shall be thankful.

I shall recall "it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" (yet another opening line from one of the greats, George Orwell, in "1984"), a spring of impossibility despite the smell of freshly cut grass, mine and my deed yester-evening, "the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain" (the third in a row, you are welcome), the day the earth stood still in its trembling that it wished would go unnoticed, when all my previous assumptions about life must be called into question.

And I shall be filled with gratitude how this crown of thorns rehearsed me for a stillness that I shall fall into, a stillness that is not peace itself but necessary for it.

As I was writing I kept looking down between my legs where my dog would often climb up and with no warning, first with her left forearm on my seat and then catapult the rest of herself onto my laps.  But three times today it wasn't her but an opening, an empty space of her exact prior shape.  I took me three times to finally read it true.

"In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street."

Yours, Alex