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136 TIME, AGAIN December 24 Time, again. I have been writing this memoir, sporadically and unevenly, for almost a year. I do not go back and reread my entries, and who knows? Maybe I will never want to relive these past ten months. I know I have often written about time, its brevity , its compression, and its disappearance. Time blurs. Days of the week pass now without my always quite knowing which day it is—Wednesday? Thursday? I look at my big wall calendar, scribbled with notations and appointments, to steady myself. I want to keep my feet firmly planted on today. Since James and I have entered our hospice program, time has morphed once again. Perhaps that sense of an approaching end, no matter how many months away, has made me listen differently to the voice that so frequently natters, complaining, in my head: “I wish I could drop in on Barb this afternoon, but I don’t have time.” “If only I could drive to the zoo one afternoon—I haven’t been there foryears—but I don’t have time.”“If I had time, I could join that gym with a swimming pool. Oh, I wish I could swim for just half an hour today instead of stomping around on these icy sidewalks.” “I want to sit in my cushy yellow chair in the sunshine and read one of my piled-up new books, but I don’t have time.” “Will I ever play the piano again?” “Can I imagine ever time, again 137 cooking for friends again?” “Will I ever have time?” My entries here are filled with that voice. Now I hear a response, as automatic as an echo. I am startled by how this echo—just one line, the last sentence of a novella by Katherine Anne Porter—has appeared in my mind. I read “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” the title story of a collection first published in 1939, at least forty years ago. Where has this line been hiding? I don’t even remember the plots of some novels I read last month or the week before. Nor have I ever returned to this story. (Just now, I hurried down to a basement shelf stuffed with dusty books. Pale Horse, Pale Rider was still there, its paperback spine cracking apart as soon as I opened the yellowing pages. I only wanted to make sure I was right about that line. I was.) In this story two young people, Miranda and Adam, fall in love. The story takes place during World War I, at the height of the influenza epidemic that swept mercilessly through America. Adam is a soldier. Miranda and Adam meet when he is on leave, about to depart for the front. I remember their rapidly unfolding love story, tender and believable. They have discovered each other just in time. (There it is again: time.) Miranda, however, becomes ill almost to death with the flu, and Adam faithfully nurses her. When she finally awakens, she learns that the war is over. She also learns that Adam has died of the influenza. As Miranda, dazed, considers her new future, she sees an utterly changed world around her. She thinks to herself— and this is the clear-eyed, devastating line that in its stark pain has stayed with me all these years—“Now there would be time for everything.” ...

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