224 months does not sound like a long time and yet if you tot up the list, you realize you can fit in an awful lot: eight Halloween costumes, the smallest bike and the bigger ones,  five years of tennis lessons, ten of piano.  It’s enough time to get the English language down cold, starting with the word dog in this case, and enough to get French down passably well, starting with bonjour and moving onto the subjunctive mood.

  You’d think there wouldn’t be much left after all that, but there’s still time left for the times tables, and quadratic equations, and roughly 720 hours of homework spent solving for x. 

  But  I see I’m stressing the sheer learning which was not my intention, however impressive it is that in 224 you months can go from “dog” all the way to, say,  “prolixity”, even if you only learn that one for the SAT test.  I wanted to include the imaginary life, the enthusiasms, the knight period, the witch period, the Zorro period, the period in which everyone was addressed with charming condescension as “honey”.

  And above these chapters soar the longer arcs,  imperceptible until suddenly grasped in retrospect.  How,  for example, the bed that began as the “big” one, changes without changing at all, to appear not quite big enough.  Or how, in the comfortably repetitive marches from Advent to Christmas to Easter, you realize that the voice you thought you knew so well, the one still urging praise with timbrel and harp, is no longer the same one that started out in the short cassock and the treble staff.

  224 months can amply fit all of this, and still have room for the biggest part: the incessant branching out and tangling up of relationships, experiences, inside jokes, emotions, tastes, opinions, the flowering, in short, of a personality.

  And in amongst all of this are moments.  They are moments of great meaning and yet their meaning seems impossible now to render.  I cannot fix in words the feel of that afternoon at St. Paul’s, or the time at the beach, or the mimicry at the dinner table, or the sheer radiant joy of a glance.

  Let it be enough to say  that there were thousands of moments in 224 months and that the last one was in a cinder block college dorm in Boston where we said good-bye to our only son, one month shy of his eighteenth birthday

  Seventeen years and eleven months makes 215, plus 9 months of pregnancy equals 224 months in all.  And in our farewells, I felt like I was hearing for the first time the voice that I thought I knew so well, for it seemed at that moment to have a little of all his voices, and the body that I hugged felt like the sum of all his bodies, so much the same, so different. I could feel all of the past moments in this final one but what I wanted was to linger over each one by itself, perhaps starting with the present and then working back towards dog.  We hugged and hugged, but it did not suffice, for grasp as I did, I still could not capture it all.  Wait, don’t leave.  Let me begin again.