My brother died a year ago, and in that year people have asked me, here and there, always tenderly, always with real interest, which is a sweet gift, what do you miss most about him?
And for a while I would say things like his false gruffness, or the way his stern glare would suddenly give way to a shy smile like sun through a hedge, or the way no man on earth ever loved making sandwiches in the kitchen as much as he did, and nobody over the age of eight more enjoyed a glass of milk with his sandwich either.
But now I find myself saying things like the way his moustache was bristling and adamant under the prow of his nose, or the way his hair would not stay combed even though the man was in his 60s for heaven's sake, or the way his shoes as big as boats waited for him in the slanting sunlight of the mudroom of his house where hung also his caps and hats, and do we ever think about what a worn familiar old cap might feel, having lost the head that loved it for 30 years?
Do we?
If you were a worn familiar lovely old Irish cap, and you had waited anxiously all night every night for 30 years for the blessing of the morning when he would reach for you and knead you with real affection and something almost like reverence for the way you sheltered his tumultuous head for 30 years, and then fold you gently over his ungovernable hair and down over the prow of his nose, and away with the two of ye into the wind and the rain, voyaging across campus and through the woods and around the town, until the moment when he stepped back into the mudroom, and removed you, and shook the holy water from you, and hung you again on the poke of your peg, wouldn't you wonder where he was the first few days after he vanished, and then feel something like a silent sadness, and wonder if he would ever again knead you and don you and doff you and reach for you with real affection and something almost like reverence?
We are so sure that we are the only ones who feel things, but how very wrong we might well be.
His pens and pencils and notebooks; his vast collections and volumes