A Dream of Immortality

And we laughed to think how foolish we’d been to believe for a moment he’d ever died … and he was the one who laughed hardest of all …

Then he showed me around his new place … it had a courtyard like the French Quarter, but was also like the press room of the Arlington Citizen-Journal in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s when he would take me to work with him … and everything was there, the big letter press, the silver mountain of molten metal, the Linotype machines, even the Coca-Cola machine with the big white box of donuts on top, and I asked in awe,

“Is that the real letter press from those days, or just a replica?” and awaited his reply, but when he replied, it was muffled and distant and his manner suddenly detached, causing me to wonder did I offend him? … But in the next moment he turned towards me, and in the fading red sunlight suddenly I saw his shining face

much younger than I’d seen him in decades, and thought again how wonderful and what a relief and a miracle to walk beside him once again and to know he never died, and what a silly scare it had been, the weeks in the hospital, the sorrow and the horror … and to know it had all been a fleeting phantom, the mere shadow of death and nothing more, and there was life yet to come and plenty of it, and never again would he ever die …