Discover Top Posts Tagged with #john updike

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

John Updike, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

John Updike, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

Back from Vacation

by John Updike

“Back from vacation,” the barber announces, or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan. They are amazed to find the workaday world still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs, their customers having hardly missed them, and there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders, the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas, the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies, the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities. But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims. Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit, warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small, the evidence says, though their hearts cry, “Not so!”

#poetry #john updike #back from vacation