“Do you even recognize me?” Dad said on the night we arrived at their house. He sucked in his small paunch, and his chest ballooned theatrically beneath a silk, floral shirt. “The treadmill is terrifying—I’ve fallen off a few times—but after I’m on it for fifteen minutes, it’s unbelievable how I feel. She’s terrific, that trainer. She has me lifting weights!”
“You’ve fallen off the treadmill?” I asked.
“It’s nothing,” Mom said, shuffling over to Dad in her slippers and luxurious burgundy terry-cloth robe. She handed him a foul-smelling smoothie in a plastic cup. “We’re old,” she said. “We fall sometimes.”
In the shadow of a cedar tree that gave you / sleep, one summer, one summer when all responsibilities / seemed to die (or so you dreamed)—water lilies / in a nearby pond, arms languishing at your side. . . .
Mr. Kwong did not count himself among the retired men for whom idleness bred new hobbies, who got up religiously for sunrise tai chi at the park or cultivated a collection of bonsai.
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