Memory in the Third Person

He sat on the floor of the back porch looking through the screen door at the rain plopping in the puddle by the side of the wooden steps going down to the yard. He was very aware that the porch was between the house and the rest of the world, and it was as though he was looking at the day itself, the rain, the grey everywhere he could see. He felt sad and alone but also he felt a kind of joy just being there, just sitting there looking at the grey rain-filled world on the other side of the screen---and he wasn’t completely alone, there was a kitten by his side on the wooden floor of the porch. He found that he could be sad and lonely and happy all at once, and it was as though all those feelings were not only inside him but also in the thick air of the porch all around him and in the grey rain outside.

Now, approximately three-quarters of a century later, he thinks he understands a little better the beauty of the shimmering grey monotone of that moment. Sometimes the picture in his memory includes the figure of the little boy, as though the camera is placed on the porch pointing both at him and the rain through the screen-door, and sometimes the camera is outside pointing toward him on the porch as he watches the rain---a slightly magical camera, for the man is shown a thin dark-haired boy of four or five sitting next to a small kitten as though the screen door and the outside wall of the porch were as transparent as the time between that afternoon’s rain and the present moment, remembering.