Time seemed to accelerate as I walked around the city, past churches, closed shop fronts, crowds milling in front of pubs. The churches seemed to crumble, the shop signs shimmered, the skin of young women pleated in the eastward wind. Flowers burst and died in seconds, even as the Corrib slowed its flow where skeletal fishermen stooped over the hedgerow overlooking the weir.

Now I consider my father's heart, 5,111 miles away. My father's post-surgery heart beats in a hospital in San Diego. I've seen pictures of a triple bypass surgery, of doctors in blue standing around a cavity opened under a white sheet, surrounded by scissors, sponges, and scalpels. I've tried to connect those instruments to the cavity under the sheet, to my father's heart.

Time accelerated as I walked along the canal, past the growing spires and blooming trees and dying everything, everything dying, and now I think only of my father's freshly scarred heart.

<<