I hear the phone ring as I’m heading out the door to pick up my son from school and I think at first it can’t be that important and I’m going to be late if I answer it, but then I think it might be the school or my wife, my wife saying maybe she’s going to pick up my, our, child from school and so there’s no reason to leave, could be I’ve forgotten that I’m supposed to bring him to his violin lesson and she’s reminding me, either every Tuesday and Thursday or Monday and Wednesday, can’t remember which, not even sure what day it is today, either Tuesday or Wednesday, the violin lessons he’s been going to for nearly seven years started out all of us playing the violin, the Suzuki method it’s called, but wasn’t even six months before he surpassed me, his mother too, only three years old then, practiced all the time, one day even heard him practicing from sun up until sundown, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for twelve hours, twelve hours an approximate guess and could have been less or even more, but hated “Twinkle, Twinkle” after that more than anything even though now it’s plain to see it was all worth it, an amazing musician everyone says, his mentor and his mother says, I say, and sometimes I imagine she and I, some day in the future, going to see him play, twenty years in the future when he’d be thirty or thirty-one now I guess, and I’d be older and with gray hair, imagine him playing like the silence is his foe and we’d clap if we could but can’t because our arms are paralyzed with pride, and only two days and a couple hours later I’d die in my sleep, next to my wife, happy and at peace with all the world.

I sleep on the left side of the bed where I’ve slept for as long as I’ve slept with anyone else, his mother on the right side and we each have our own little end tables with a reading lamp each and whatever book or other reading material we’re reading at the time, my watch, my grandfather’s watch, and also the alarm clock on my side since she always wakes up naturally, her body a natural alarm clock while I’ve always thought that without an alarm clock I might never wake up, and then one day I don’t. Of course I don’t know for sure what would happen since I’d be dead, but imagine my wife waking up naturally ten to fifteen minutes before I would have woken up just like she always does, says she always does, and whatever she does between then and the ten to fifteen minutes later I’ve never had a clue, maybe just lie there, think about the day to come, go over the grocery list or some persisting problem with a friend, coworkers, me, in her head, but then the alarm would go off, my alarm, the unnatural one, and after waiting a good thirty seconds for me to wake up and turn it off she’d reach her arm over me to turn it off herself and look down at my face, nose, mouth, chest and realize I’d stopped breathing.

I’d have chosen beforehand to be cremated, chose already, not especially for any religious or spiritual reason but just for efficiency’s sake, economy of space, don’t especially like the idea of taking up however much space it’d take up to be buried and besides, once the brain or soul or heart or whatever it is dies the body’s just a husk and no more useful than firewood and maybe even less so since there’s not many people would want to warm themselves beside a burning body, ashes strewn as per my wife, his mother’s, wishes, wherever she wanted, on a bluff overlooking the sea really just as fine with me as in a can of Maxwell House. She’d be the benefactor too until she died as well and then it’d be him, only him, not a great deal of money but enough to keep him comfortable in addition to the money he makes performing, eventually he has children of his own, my grandchildren, myself their grandfather whom they never meet but beautiful children, musically inclined, maybe not the violin but a reed instrument, wind instrument, oboe, clarinet, something with air and lungs.

So yes, good, a fine life even with its sour patches of course but in each life a little rain must fall, not sure who said or wrote that but definitely someone I read in college, the full poem and not just the little quote copied on greeting cards or notes of condolence, definitely one of the Romantics and maybe Keats or Coleridge or Longfellow, yes, I think Longfellow, “Some days must be dark and dreary,” it ends, doesn’t have to end, by which I mean that far into the future there’s no telling what kind of technological advancements they’d have made by then in the extension of human life, could be by then you could live as long as you wanted to, not forever necessarily but certainly as long as you wanted, never go before your time to go, cures for everything from cancer, leukemia, to the common cold, and speaking of which it looks like it’s about to rain, clouds moving in, think maybe I should grab a coat and also a coat for my son since he probably didn’t bring one when he left this morning, didn’t leave this morning, could pick up a coat for him and myself and answer the phone in case it’s important, which is now one more reason to head back inside and answer the phone even after all this time, all this time I’ve wasted thinking about it when I could have already answered the phone and grabbed the raincoats if I’d thought about it, just inside the door, his he’s almost grown out of, will probably need to get a new one before the winter’s out, which I will, and the phone’s still ringing even after all this time which makes me think I really should answer it, which I do, probably really important to be ringing all this time, not the school or my wife but the hospital calling to tell me it’s time to make a decision already.