Lost Time (1997)

Jay Kidd

It was on an airplane that I let my 

mother read the first paragraph of 

Swann’s Way, my travel reading. 

She, the eternal English major, 

confessed that she’d never read

Proust. Her eyes were wide with

delight as she said “now that is a

sentence!” the one about the 

gentle boy grasping the ephemeral 

mysteries and terrors of sleeping and 

waking. Then, somewhere over Virginia 

I think, I had some reason to tell her 

that almost all of my friends had 

died of AIDS. She burst into tears, 

putting her head in her hands,

stiff and bent from arthritis.  

I realized that I had never told anyone 

that fact before.  As we parted at

LaGuardia, she to the suburbs

and I to the city, she looked at me, her

right eye red from a blood vessel that

burst when she cried, and said 

“I had no idea” her voice almost a

whisper, her eyes again filling

with tears as she turned and 

walked away, pulling her small,

compact suitcase behind her.