Wore your boots

Wore your boots today,and your parka. It was our first snow of the winter this year. Sidewalks are slippery, there is slush in the curb cuts.  Your parka has a hood which prevents the wind from slicing into my face flesh.  Your boots are lined, so even though they are rubber they are warm.  Temperature today was in the 20s.  Your dad and I went to see a movie, a documentary about a high class erotic dancing show in Paris called Crazy Horse. 

I thought all of these women who dance in the show are just the age you would be now, or a bit younger. Perfect specimens.  But the women are more like prize animals in a country fair, whose perfect buttocks make them uniformly boring.  How can you distinguish one from the other?

You were unique. You were our one and only.  Thank God for that.

Love,

Mom

How Dina Aunty relished her memories. Mummy and Daddy were the same, talking about their yesterdays and smiling in that sad-happy way while selecting each picture, each frame from the past, examining it lovingly before it vanished again in the mist. But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be re-created—not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

> From A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry