I find myself in the unusual position, at age 73, of having outlived both my father and my son. My dad, Phil Marton, died at age 36, when I was 8 years old. My son, Tom Marton, died at age 42, when I was 62 years old. I think of them both often and sometimes imagine the three of us sitting down together and reminiscing our separate memories, something we couldn’t always do in this lifetime.
Author Cormac McCarthy evokes this connection between father and son at the end of his novel No Country for Old Men. The hero of the story, an old sheriff in west Texas, describes a recent dream he had experienced about his father, who had died as a young man, many years in the past:
…it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
I seem to have landed in my own version of “no country for old men”, a twilight land that I enter alone, having lost both father and son. For my part, I will hold on to the old sheriff’s dream. In my own version of the dream both father and son are waiting beyond the cold and darkness, offering a guiding light and a hoped-for reunion.
###
Note: there is also a film version of No Country for Old Men, which is very faithful to the novel. Here is a clip of the final scene from the film, in which the old sheriff describes his dream:
////
////
////
////
////
////
////
////
memories of tommy 