My brother Frank borrowed my copy of The Old Man and the Sea when we were seventeen. He never gave it back. Then he died.
I've got a stack of his books now. Unreturned. I can't bring myself to take them to the library.
Yesterday my aunt showed up without calling first. She's ninety-two and still drives. She looked at the books and said, 'You've turned into the librarian of this family.'
That night I took a cab to meet my son for dinner. The driver was a young woman with a tattoo on her wrist. She said, 'You have the hands of someone who's learned how to let go.'
I said I was a butcher. She said, 'Not the hands of a butcher. The hands of someone who sets down the knife at the end of the day.'
I've been thinking about that. For fifty years I rose before dawn, cut meat, went home, slept. But when no one's watching, I'm not the butcher. I'm the old man who keeps his brother's books and waits for his aunt to visit.
That's who I've become. Quiet. Soft. Almost ready to return what I borrowed.