Once Upon A Time

I have been reading a novel in which one of the teenage characters recalls only very dimly the mother she lost in an accident when the child was a baby.  It inspired me to think back as  I often do to the memory of my father who died when I was six, and all I remember of him then was his body lying in a coffin.  But strangely enough I have a kind of memory of a physical being when I was four and had an appendicitis attack and he took me to the hospital, I remember being carried in his arms, for emergency surgery,  Not much of a memory but the man was in this recollection young and vigorous.  He was in fact 46.  And then in a flash I had a vivid memory of my first wife, who died when she was twenty six; her bright youthful skin tones, the smoothness of the skin, the flash of her eyes, the strength of her smile, everything about her said "young," which I was beholding in my eighty six year old self, and she was so present and yet in her youth so alien to me in my setting.  Mother, whom I next met walking down Memory Lane, was very hard for me to recall as the woman of 61 who fell asleep on her sofa watching the Army-McCarthy hearings and never woke up, much more vivid as the angry, frightening presence when she confronted me with "being homosexual;" she was a vigorous fifty two, anger making her an outstanding presence.  It was 1946.  My mother in law lived into her late nineties and I saw her often--she even came to visit for two weeks when I lived in Athens, when she was 80.  After years of a somewhat metallic relationship, not improved by her daughter's dislike of her or at least disappointment perhaps because her mother was not good at loving, she took to the divorced son-in-law and I to her, parentless as I was, and I can easily recall her looks, her strong features softening into a kind of blob of old person's flesh, the powder she wore turning her into a kind of doll.  Strange but rather sweet. Yet the interesting thing is that in all our late in life interactions she became more and more a personality to me; I grew to like her.   And my second wife?  Well, I can recall her vividly as a young woman in her twenties, nude or clothed, in or out of bed, and then of course we were divorced, and time seemed to make her fade, but I remember so well the two of us laughing and drinking and making love when were young.  We were so young, it was before the children arrived, that brief moment of time, when Mary had just recently died, and Penny and I had relatively empty lives, as though we were in an enchanted house of many rooms to walk through. Very heaven, those years!  The three boyfriends of my younger days, the two with whom I keep up, now both in their sixties when once they were early twenties to my forty five or so, are grand old men, well married, fulfilled, handsome, always clothed of course but I so well remember their young bodies of yesteryear underneath, and now young and old we meet on equal terms--a sixty five year old is not that much different from an eighty five year old!