truman capote's memories -- 6/26/15

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We are celebrating our tenth anniversary! All month we will be sending Delanceyplace.com encores that our subscribers picked as their favorites, starting with the top ten Delanceyplace.com excerpts, followed by ten more favorites. Thanks for reading and enjoy!

Ten More Favorites!

Today's encore selection -- from A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. Little seven-year-old Truman Capote, abandoned by his parents and raised by dirt-poor relatives in Alabama, is closest friends with his distant cousin, an elderly, simple minded, and slightly crippled woman named Sook. On a cold and empty Christmas afternoon she exclaims to him:

Young Truman Capote Sook, 1930's

" 'My, how foolish I am!' she cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what I've always thought?' she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. 'I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun shining through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine takes away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are,' -- her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie, our dog, pawing earth over her bone -- 'just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.' "