Its Sunday Morning in Early Novemberand there are a lot of leaves already. I could rake and get a head start. The boys summer toys need to be putin the basement. I could clean it out or fix the broken storm window. When Eli gets home from Sunday school, I could take him fishing. I don't fishbut I could learn to. I could show him how much fun it is. We don't do as much as we used to do. And my wife, there's so much I haven't told her lately, about how quickly my soul is aging, how it feels like a basement I keep filling with everything I'm tired of surviving. I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I cant stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling up about the beginning of the end of understanding . . .Meanwhile, its such a beautiful morning, the changing colors, the hypnotic light. I could sit by the window watching the leaves, which seem to know exactly how to fall from one moment to the next. Or I could lose everything and have to begin over again. Talking to OurselvesA woman in my doctors office last weekcouldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls, the difference between dog and deer ticks,how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie with her at night in the summer grass, singing Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor, stopped under our lopsided maple to explainhow his wife of sixty years died last month of Alzheimers. I stood there, listening to his longing reach across the darkness with each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.This morning my five-year-old asked himself why he'd come into the kitchen. I understoodhe was thinking out loud, personifying himself,but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.When my fathers vending business was failing, he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent. He didn't care that I was there, listening, what he was saying was too important. Too important, I hear myself sayingin the kitchen, putting the dishes away,and my wife looks up from her readingand asks, Whats that you said? SpecimenI turned sixty in Paris last year. We stayed at the Lutetia, where the Gestapo headquarteredduring the war, my wife, two boys, and me, and several old Vietnamese ladies carrying poodles with diamond collars. Once my father caught a man stealing cigarettes out of one of his vending machines. He didn't stop choking him until the pool hall stunk of excrement and the body dropped to the floor like a judgment. When I was last in Paris I was dirt poor, hiding from the Vietnam War. One night, in an old church, I considered taking my life. I didn't know how to be so young and not belong anywhere, stuck among so many perplexing melodies.I loved the low white buildings, the ingratiating colors, the ancient light. We couldn't afford such luxury.It was a matter of pride.My father di Excerpted from Failure by Philip Schultz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
