Closing paragraph of "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler:
"Cody held on to his elbow and led him towards the others. Overhead, seagulls drifted through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood - the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother's upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee."
"And when did you last see your father?" by Blake Morrison (a memoir). (I read an extract in the Sunday Times in the 1990's and decided I must buy the book. I had forgotten that it is signed to me by Blake Morrison inside the front cover but I don't remember getting it signed, which is odd.)
A moving, courageous and often funny memoir of Morrison's loving but complicated relationship with his Dad:
He isn't drinking, isn't eating. He wear his trousers open at the waist, held up not by a belt but by pain and swelling. He looks like death, but he is not dead, and won't be for another four weeks. He has driven down from Yorkshire to London. He has made it against the odds. He is still my father. He is still here.
"I've brought some plants for you."
"Come and sit down first, Dad, you've been driving for hours."
"No, best get them unloaded."
It's like Birnam Wood coming to Sunsinane, black plastic bags and wooden boxes blooming in the back seat, the rear window, the boot: herbs, hypericum, escallonia, cotoneaster, ivies, potentillas. He directs me where to leave the different plants - which will need shade, which sun, which shelter. Like all my father's presents, they come with a pay-off - he will not leave until he has seen every one of them planted: "I know you. And I don't want them drying up."
We walk round the house, the expanse of rooms, so different from the old flat. "It's wonderful to see you settled at last," he says, and I resist telling him that I'm not settled, have never felt less settled in my life. I see his eyes taking in the little things to be done, the leaky taps, the cracked paint, the rotting window frames.
"You'll need a new switch unit for the mirror light - the contact has gone, see."
"Yes."
"And a couple of two-inch Phillips screws will solve this."
"I've got some. Let's have a drink now, eh."
"What's the schedule for tomorrow?" he asks, as always, and I'm irritated, as always, at his need to parcel out the weekend into a series of tasks, as if without a plan of action it wouldn't be worth his coming, not even to see his son or grandchildren. "I don't think I'll be much help to you," he says, "but I'll try." By nine-thirty he is in bed and asleep."
