WISPY MEMORY

He walked down the almost empty corridor, his steps challenging the resonant silence with its resounding echoes…. His quick gait, his hands clutching d bright green folder, his downwards tilted face, all betrayed the carefree expression that he worked so hard to perfect… His destination was the second last door at the end of this endless corridor, the thought of which made walking a bit lighter…

He reached the door, hesitated for a tiny bit, then entered… Covering the distance from his house to the door took him half an hour, but covering the distance from the door to the chair by the window… it took an eternity, or so it seemed to him… He did not know how to address him, the bald, old man in the chair, staring out to infinity… A few years ago, such a thought would never have entered his mind, but now…

He went near him and stood there for a while, but the old man showed no signs of even being aware someone else is there besides him… So he pulled up a chair and sat down, facing him… Still the old man sat, staring out, entranced, as if Utopia had shifted base, right in front of his window….

He cleared his throat, and opened his folder… He extracted some dozen white sheets, clutched them tightly till his knuckles were as white as the sheets…. His mind hurled a million questions at him, questioning his sanity… Then on an impulse he started put them one by one on the window sill….

They were sketches, random sketches, of random objects… There was a house, a vintage car, a dog, two children playing with an older man, a bench, a shiny green bench…. He placed them all, watching him intensely, waiting for a sign, something, a flicker of interest, of recognition maybe…

But he saw nothing… The old man saw them, his face a blank map, illegible, unemotional, vide… He closed his eyes for a long painful moment, giving up hope on his nth idea… He reached out to collect the fragments of his disappointment, when the old man suddenly reached out too, picking up the sketch of the shiny green bench…. A bench that stood somewhere, in a park he can’t remember, on a street he can’t recall, seating people he can never identify… But the bench touched a chord in the unsettled chaos, a faint whisper of remembrance…

He got up, leaving the rest of the sketches behind… He knew that the unruly wind would probably blow away most of the sketches, but  he could hope now that it won’t blow away the tiny wispy memory that had come back at last…to his grandfather….