JUST TODAY I CAME upon the picture postcard. It fell out of a book that I had not opened for years.
I had found the painting in a London museum, stood before it and remembered Uncle Ben, long gone. In the museum shop I had bought the postcard reproduction of the painting and took it for my own, as Uncle Ben took it long ago for his and lost it. I must have found it again for him.
Today I have so long gazed upon the picture, here in a faraway place, in an ancient holy city far from my own place where I first heard Uncle Ben’s unexpected story and where Uncle Ben lies now in the ground with his ancestors, and mine, many who, with me, had heard his sudden story that long-ago summer night; I have today so long gazed upon that picture that I have come into a vision—an “apparition” my mother would have called it—made of true memory and outrageous fabrication. And that is what I have to tell, what has risen up so long later from the image hidden early in my mind by Uncle Ben’s story and freed by the picture postcard of the beautiful painting called The Light of the World.