September 7, 2014

Out my window the moon is rising, the air is from the northwest, the wind bringing with it a breath of coolness
after three or four days of scorching and humid damp. The moon when it rises in the east always makes me think of the nights when I would put Elizabeth to bed and look out her bedroom window facing east and see it and tell her to look too.
I put the pictures back up today, the ones that had been in the closet for the summer, the pictures of her when she was ten, then fourteen, then when she and I were laughing in France and she was sixteen. We both knew something about life and about each other and were happy about the whole thing, or if not happy at least resigned to it with all of its imperfections. There were many moments like that, and I want to think that those moments outnumbered the times we were unhappy with each other, or were resenting each other, and just waiting for later when we would have gotten past all of that adolescent longing and rejecting not knowing that later would not come.
The wind blew hard today as I was coming home from the grocery store. Richard had said earlier, only Elizabeth knew how to teach him how to use the computer. She was slow, and patient, and understood how much time he needed. She was also spirited and she loved the wind. Tonight I felt the wind go right through me, and I thought it might be her reminding me to pay attention.

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