Impressions and Collage: A Memoir in Glimpses

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Michael Hettich

Impressions and Collage: A Memoir in Glimpses

 

What is it that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?
   —Mark Strand

 

  1

T’m in our neighborhood park watching a young woman at play with her baby. It’s a spring afternoon. They are laughing at nothing, simply laughing at their own happiness. There are pigeons and older children, people reading off phones; a group of girls in the distance is dancing and laughing to a pop tune of many years ago. The grass is soggy and the day is growing cool. Now the woman picks up her little boy and starts to walk slowly home, carrying him all the way. I imagine she loves the weight of him, the sweet smell of his breath. She sings silly songs as they walk along, and he sings back, still laughing, still too young to form the words, though he appears to understand them all. They stop often to admire flowers and insects and pieces of glass, newspapers blowing down the street, bikes passing on the sidewalk.
  I imagine someone watches from an upstairs window, a lonely man who lives in a wheelchair.
  Somehow, without knowing it, they bless him as they pass.

 

In another room, a young man has been praying for hours, quietly rocking back and forth on his knees, whispering a little without words, like the breath of wind beneath a slightly open window. He’s dressed neatly, a dress shirt tucked in his jeans; his shoes wait at the door. He prays for a glimpse of something he finds difficult to name. None of his many friends knows he does this; his family has no inkling. But he prays for longer and longer periods every day, until he’s almost disappeared. He doesn’t believe in any god, as far as he knows; he just knows that by praying he reaches something true. And it’s not like meditation, since he feels as though he’s . . .
. . . . . . .
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