Chapter 102
His eyesight had been declining slowly since he was seventy, managed with glasses and good light. At seventy-six there were afternoons when reading required more effort than he wished to spend, Thomas taught his first class alone at twenty-two, in a secondary school in Kingston. He called Marcus from the corridor afterwards, barely audible through what Marcus understood to be a complex mixture of triumph and overwhelm.
What He Said to Thomas After
He said: the feeling you have right now hold it. Not the specific emotion, which will settle. But the knowledge that this is where you belong. When things get hard, which they will, come back to that knowledge, It is the ground.
The Night of the Storm
A storm came to Kingston in October of Marcus's seventy-seventh year the serious kind, the kind the mountains broke but not entirely, the kind that tested roofs and infrastructure and the community's relationship with itself. The yard held, as the yard had always held. The people came to each other in the way people come to each other when the external systems have given way and only the human ones remain.
He turned seventy-eight in the garden, in the evening, with Nia. Not a gathering just the two of them, with good food and the last of the light. He had learned, in the eighth decade, the value of the small celebration: precise and complete, Nia at seventy was, Marcus thought, the most beautiful she had ever been, Not in a physical sense exclusively although the physical sense was also true but in the completeness sense. A person full of what they had built and still curious. The Young Teachers he was invited, at seventy-eight, to speak to a cohort of newly qualified teachers at a Kingston secondary school. He had not spoken to a group of teachers in some years.