Chapter 104
He was told about the naming at a faculty meeting and was, briefly, embarrassed not from false modesty but from the genuine surprise of institutions honoring you while you are still fully present.
What He Said at the Center's Opening
He said: A research center is only as good as what it refuses to ignore. If this center exists to examine the education of Caribbean children, it must examine the actual conditions of Caribbean children's lives the yards, the shared spaces, the community structures that shape them before and during and after school, It must look at all of it that is my only instruction.
The community garden that Nia had been tending in the apartment courtyard was twenty years old. The beds were full, the bench worn, the water feature a fixture of the space. A second generation of residents was planting in them now, He read differently at seventy-nine than he had at thirty. Slower from necessity partly, but also from choice , He had discovered that some books he had read quickly at thirty were better read slowly at seventy. They had more in them when you brought more life to them.
The Festival
Kingston held a literary festival that Marcus had attended most years since he was in his forties. At eighty, he attended as an honored figure a category he was still not entirely comfortable with, though he was better at receiving it than he had been. He turned eighty in the garden at home with Nia and their family. Thomas brought him a book he had found at a secondhand seller a first edition of one of the books that had shaped Marcus's thinking in university. He turned it over in his hands.
The mango tree was twenty years old It had reached a height Marcus thought was close to what the original had been before the split. The third branch was solid and high. Thomas climbed it regularly.
The Third Grandchild's Question
Joseph's third grandchild the loud one who had been born with opinions was now twelve, and asked Marcus at a Sunday gathering: 'Pa Marcus, why do you write?'
His Answer at Eighty
He said: Because writing is how I think. And because thinking is how I make sense of what I'm given. And because I wanted other people to know that what they're given their lives, their places, their specific experience is worth thinking about carefully. That's all it has ever been.
Leroy's memory began to change at seventy-two. Not dramatically nothing dramatic had ever characterized Leroy's way with things. But the distant past became more present, the immediate sometimes required more effort. Marcus visited Leroy every Thursday, This had become the arrangement without being formally arranged, which was how the most important things always happened between they talked about the yard. About the boys they had been about the mango tree both trees, the old one and the new one. They talked about Sandra and Nia. About their children. Sometimes Leroy confused the names, but his love for each of them was entirely clear.
Memory was not linear, Marcus was learning. In his own eighties, the past and the present occupied the same dimension with increasing regularity. He would smell something machine oil, or mango, or the particular spice of his mother's cooking and be entirely in two times simultaneously.
Elise at sixty was at the height of what she was her practice full, her reputation established, her thinking deepening in the ways that the sixth decade deepens things for people who have kept their attention sharp.