What Lingers

What Lingers by debgrant

Memories. They torture us with the illusion of greener grass, better days, the cruel and foolish god of normal. They make us warm to ourselves. They make us shiver. They surface fears we don’t always understand. They are robbed from us by aging and disease. Memories mystify and teach.

I knew a man living and dying inside a brain firing and shorting out with longer periods of outages. We would recite together antiphonally verse by verse the poem Jabberwocky like a liturgy. Yet, on my last visit, before he died, after he no longer recognized who was saying “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” he flashed gleefully “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe!” Memory mystifies, teaches and sometimes still knows the sound of love if not the face or name.

Lately, I’ve been pondering what lingers. When I finish reading a book, what lingers as the last page turns? What lingers from that same book after more time passes? Same thing with movies. I am surprised that some books or movies that I completely enjoyed or lost myself entirely in the story or the lives of the characters don’t always linger. And that really is okay. They have their moment. Like live music or a sermon or a speech, the live moment has a life of its own - sometimes criminally boring or glistening with fire. The event is so quickly gone from my memory hidden forever unless a tickle of a prompt sends it to the surface like a champagne bubble.

And yet there are some scenes, lines or quotes or strains or brushstrokes of art that stand at the ready inside my psyche waiting for the right moment to salute and join the action at the front.

I am interested in hearing what lingers for you in books or movies, music or any of the visual arts.

What triggered this flood of recollections for me most recently was a dinner scene from the movie “Don’t Look Up.” The whole scene is lovely. The dialog delicious. The one utterance delivered without lots of drama by the Leonardo DiCaprio character lingers for me. He said quietly and introspectively, “You know, we really did have everything.” That line, that feeling, that thought lingers like comfort food that lets your body not be hungry a little longer. I continue to feast on it. It lingers.

Peace,

Deb