Do you remember the O’Henry (William Sydney Porter) short story about the young woman who had pneumonia and thought she would die when the last autumn leaf fell off the courtyard tree?
I won’t give away the ending – you can read the story for yourself by way of the link at the bottom of this entry – but it’s an O’Henry story, which if you know anything about him means you ought to be able to guess.
Funny, you’d think it would have been Hans Christian Andersen who would have written exclusively happy endings, but then there’s his story, The Little Match Girl, and if my memory serves me at all, the little match girl met with an even worse fate than that terribly tragic salt shaker in the TV commercial – the one I can barely look at, I find the whole thing so upsetting.
I have no idea where I am going with any of this.
I was up late last night, reading Linda Spalding’s Who Named The Knife (2005) – and who knew until this minute that Linda Spalding’s ‘Michael’ – the man she fell in love with oh so many years ago – is Michael Ondaatje? Small world.
Anyway, there was something in her prose and in the nature of her story that made me think of Don, and of people dying with cancer, and of the arbitrary nature of our world. I can’t count the number of times I have become infuriated with the terminally optimistic notion that as long as you believe you will be well, you will – the corollary being, of course, that people like Don who died had no desire or passion for life or for living; that only those people with good thoughts get to survive. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And then, as I was falling into a deeper sleep, I had what for me was a most lyrical thought and I said to myself, I must write that down tomorrow – perhaps this will mean something to someone.
And then I woke up several hours later and I had forgotten. I hate when that happens.
Anyway, the new leaf that I am about to turn over is to fulfill the promise I once made to myself to keep a notebook close to my bedside so that when I am drifting off to sleep with someone’s chapter or movie script in my head, and those old home movies start unravelling through the REM portion of my sleep, I will be ready and able to write down any stray thoughts that occur to me.
It isn’t that I believe what I have to say is more profound or revelatory than the next person; it is merely that I think that many of us come to our own sorts of crucial truths at that juncture where story meets memory meets sleep. Lots of good things happen in bed, actually, at least until that very last act of our lives – and who can say how good or how bad that might turn out to be? (As far as I know, we have no way of knowing.)
Anyway, as I was saying…lots of good things take place while we are in bed, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at O’Henry’s short story The Last Leaf, and see for yourself.
http://classiclit.about.com/od/lastleafohenry/a/lastleaf_ohenry.htm
