THERE ARE TWO WAYS of remembering. One is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie. The faraway look in his eyes is partly the beer and partly that he's really far away.
The other way is to summon the dead past back into the living present. The young widow remembers her husband, and he is there beside her.
When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me," (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.
- Originally published in Wishful Thinking
