DECEMBER 2011

3597. “He glimpsed something generic and joyous, a pageant that would leave him behind”

“I bet,” she said, and raced to the porch, and in the
precipitate way, evasive and pleased, that she flung
herself to the top step he glimpsed something generic
and joyous, a pageant that would leave him behind.

John Updike, “Man and Daughter in the Cold”

You think you understand them, and you do a little (sometimes, you think, a little better than they understand themselves), but mostly you don’t—your kids, when they’re older, I mean; the ones big enough to take the Lift without you; the ones who sometimes still need you to give them a little time of the day, and then, mostly, for you to get out of their way. Of course, you do understand, at least a little, that they still count on you to think of them a little, pretty much every day. Or is it just that knowing a little that you count on them to count on you so, they are tender enough to oblige? I wouldn’t put it past them (the cooler they play, the kinder, they say).

The pageant will leave you behind, all right. All right: there’s always room at the Inn for the Launch Party, traditionally held the night before the departure of the Passion for Parts and Prospects unknown. “There were a lot of people there whom you would have enjoyed quite as much as I did,

Note: including the young James Merrill, who is about the age which you and I were when we were in New York” (Wallace Stevens to Witter Bynner).