3:54 a.m.

It is 3:54 a.m. I have a cold, there’s a metallic taste in my mouth, and my throat hurts. I wish we had some orange juice.

Sometimes my mother woke me up for school by touching a cool glass of orange juice to my forehead. I would awake, sit up, and eagerly drink. It's a memory that verges on tenderness. I haven’t thought about it in years.

I went to visit her in the assisted living facility recently and found her asleep in her bed. She looked unimaginably old. I sat there for a long time.

Once my brother Eddie called me a Pollyanna. He said I had my head in the clouds.

I guess he was right about that. It's easier to be optimistic when you don't have kidney disease.

Maybe the worst mistakes are mistakes of omission. Mistakes of love neglected or misplaced.

Tom Stoppard wrote that every story, made-up or otherwise, “is secretly about time, the disinterested ongoingness of everything, the unconditional mutability that makes every life poignant.”

(Oh, how I wish I had written that.)

Yesterday on the walls of this very room there were rectangular patches of morning light, and in one of them the trembling shadow of a bough of leaves.