All Creatures, Large, Small Or Otherwise

It must be that, even as adults, there are stages in our lives when we're especially susceptible to imprinting. What else could account for the fact that, remembering holiday parties at their houses or parts of vacations that we've spent together, we continue to think of certain couples as being married, when they've been divorced for years and married to other people? Or that we see small faces superimposed plain as day on the hulking figures of our friends' children? It's as if there were some kind of permanent, parallel reality beneath the reality we actually observe around us, underlying it the way Greenwich Mean Time underlies various time zones across the world -- the reality that seems to obtain in the moments when we first swim up from sleep. For me, in this coexistent reality, Barbara is still alive, living in the gray house on Benedict Canyon with the red geraniums in front, and our first dog is still alive, and our daughter is still of a size to climb right up onto the examining table next to her, which is just where she is standing when Dr. Miller comes bounding in, chuckling and rubbing his hands together, and shows her how to use the otoscope for the first time.