Wheels

Well, I picked up a book from my dusty shelf. It was by the Irish writer John McGahern: The Collected Stories. I started reading it, and it was surprising how some of the stories came back to me, although long forgotten. I was reading the short story “Wheels” and a line jumped out at me: “I got a table in the restaurant car facing a priest and a man in his fifties, a weathered face, under a hat, the blue Sunday suit limp and creased.”

Now, I don’t know why, as it’s a pretty innocuous and not very memorable line, but I not only remembered reading that sentence, but I recalled that when I first read it, I thought of my father, then being a man in his fifties. I checked the book’s printing date and my inscription (I always date books): 1992. My father would have been 55, I was 31, and McGahern himself would have been 59.

But like the train in the story, time has passed. My father is gone, McGahern is gone, my fifties are gone. There is a blue suit—in fact, three or four of them—all neatly lined up in my wardrobe. They are not limp and creased, but freshly laundered and preserved in cellophane.

Those wheels keep turning. It’s sunny outside. Two Japanese schoolboys, loud and noisy, pass by on bicycles. “Why don’t you call into my house?” one shouts. “Then only if you come round to mine,” calls the other.

Wheels. Wheels, spinning fast, forever turning—turning quiet, turning unnoticed and imperceptible. If only they knew. But therein lies the magic of that age they don’t know yet, they just ride…..living……laughing……apples in their mothers eyes