Day 7: Never Say Never

So he found his blue shirt, hanging taut from a fresh pressing, and took it out of the closet.  With ease, he removed the white undershirt he'd been wearing all day.  He never would have walked around like that when Mary was alive.  Well, she wouldn't have allowed it, that's true.  But, still he had had a great fondness for her, if not the deepest of connections.  Perhaps it was the likely outcome of teaching Yeats to undergraduates.  Love was never going to seem as profound in real life as it did in poetry, nor as profound as it seems to a 20-year-old.  Mary believed Irving had lived in an idealized world, where sunsets were always on fire and each ship found its way home.  True for the metaphysics, yes, but not true for Walcott or Bishop and usually not true for Yeats.  But, Mary's interest in poetry was only that her husband was interested in it and that it made him happy.  She obliged him the interest, seeing it that way, rather than as his passion, his career.  It could have been her father's fault.  Mary's father had never liked him.

Still, this fondness for her was very real and their life together had been pleasant.  He would have liked her to come to these dinners with him.  Why hadn't they done more of that?  Well, the blue shirt was for her.  And that, Irving felt, was nice.  It was nice to still do things for her.

He buttoned the oxford to the top, debating a tie and then deciding no.  As he turned, he shifted his weight to the right leg, carefully pivoting and hoping to avoid that left leg buckling, as it did so often.  As he moved toward the doorway, he stopped at the mirror hanging above the dresser, a baroque sort of antique that had irritated him for fifty years.  He saw his eyes there, buried a bit, but he saw them and winked, smoothed his shirt into his pants, placed his tarnished money clip into his pocket, along with the phone his daughter had given him and a small tin case with a few pills.  Irving was glad to have given up on many medicines, casualties to his no-care attitude about which sickness might eventually take him.  He hoped, as he put the tin in his pocket, that he might find lamb on the menu tonight.  It was into April, still brisk, but the equinox promised new garden bounties, delights that he took in by breath and taste and that he allowed to linger.  Perhaps Mary had been right about his world, his feeling that life was sumptuous.