Letting Pass

For two months we kept the dog run, as if she might come back. But we had killed her ourselves, or rather the vet had, with that bright needle, in Pauline's arms. Pauline had thought she was ready; she was not.

Our children's favorite toys, from when they were two, are stacked and shelved in the garage -- and their bicycles from when they were ten, and their high school trophies. And our high school trophies, and Pauline's diaries from middle school in the 1970s, and appointment calendars of my father's from the 1980s with haircuts and meetings with his students and plumbers' phone numbers in lopsided handwriting -- calendars I'd grabbed after he died ten years ago, desperate to save a piece of him, though I still can't bear to look at them. I need to hold shreds of what he'd left, but now those shreds only remind me of their inadequacy.

Daoism teaches that the world is processes that rise and fade, turn a few circles and depart, that growing is always also losing, living is the reanimation of mounds of substance many times dead before -- but I can't see it that way. I dwell in a world of things and people, who I paradoxically want to change without changing, to move along without moving, never to age. Memory is insufficient, a tease, horribly semisweet -- itself fading, dying, the resonances of a bell that will not be struck again.