The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday.
I love our rich English language! I wish that I could write that well. General Douglas Macarthur, World War II Commander in the Pacific, spoke those words during his farewell address to the cadets of West Point where he had been first in his class. They express eloquently the nostalgia that many people have during their twilight years.
One of the most beautiful passages in literature is in Marcel Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time which is sometimes entitled In Remembrance of Things Past. The adult Proust sipped a spoonful of tea in which there was a crumb of a madeleine cookie from Brittany. He was transfixed by a feeling of exquisite pleasure that he finally recognized as coming from the times when his aunt served him tea and madeleines when he was a boy.
Great writers have a deep understanding of the universality of human experiences. This is some of what Proust wrote: When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, waiting to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment . . .
Proust wrote that when he tasted the tea-soaked crumb of madeleine his aunt’s house, her garden, the water lilies on the river, the little village, its people, their houses, and their church all rose up before him like the scenery of a theater. In my case, I see my old granny when I dunk a graham cracker into a cup of coffee as I did so often when I visited her when I was a girl.
Proust understood how simple objects can trigger complex memories. Thus it was when Vicki and I carefully took out the items in old Granny’s wicker sewing basket that was passed down to my niece, Sharon Jones Rainey. The basket sat on the table next to Granny’s chair in the living room of her and Grandpa’s home on N. Adams St. in Knightstown. It measures only six-and-a-half inches square by four inches high, and it seems incredible that such a small thing could contain a life.
When I was young many women wore hairnets. I took her crocheted hairnet from the basket, and when I touched it, I saw Granny once again. She was not a prim, plump, rosy-cheeked, lavender-scented grandmother. She smelled of cigarettes and, sometimes, beer. Her dresses hung shapelessly and crookedly; her body and her cotton stockings sagged; she shuffled around in black felt carpet slippers; and her language was salty. The socket of her right eye was empty as she refused to wear a glass eye. She said, “What the Hell do I need a fake eye for at my age?”
I took out the little, oval-shaped, metal cup used when she washed out the socket of her missing eye. When she was a child she was virtually blind from cataracts. She told me that they strapped her down and removed the cataracts without the benefit of anesthesia. “It hurt like Hell, but I could read . . . I could read!” She was a voracious, compulsive reader who read constantly to my mother and my uncles. Then came glaucoma for which our modern treatments didn’t exist, and the pain was so intense that she had one eye removed and was nearly blind in the other.
No longer able to read, she substituted Talking Books. One day when I arrived she was fuming: “Dammit-all anyway! Why do they send me such tripe? I’ve told ‘em I can’t stand that mealy-mouthed Grace Livingston Hill!” Granny the unquenchable, Granny the invincible! wclarke@comcast.net