When I was twenty-five years old, I visited the National Gallery in Washington, DC with my Aunt Ann and we stood together in front of a painting by Edouard Vuillard entitled “Repast in a Garden” and something about the painting (of people sitting around a table in a garden at dusk) moved me, spoke to me, so that for twenty years, I kept the vision of it in my head: the garden and the table with its bottle of wine, the people gathered around the table, the lighted stairway in the background and the door at the top of the stairs, which is glowing and slightly ajar.

This past weekend, I was in D.C., and went to the National Gallery (again with my Aunt Ann) and stood in front of the Vuillard; and it was just as wondrous, just as moving as I remembered it being. Earlier that day, I had gone with my brother to spread my mother’s ashes in the Chesapeake Bay and we had read Frank O’Hara’s poem “Animals,” aloud, to tell her goodbye.

And so as I stood in front of the Vuillard the words in my head were Frank O’Hara’s words about being young and about how the day, then, “came fat with an apple in its mouth.” “Repast in a Garden” details the most ordinary of events (sitting at a table in a garden) and manages, somehow, to imbue that quotidian thing with a knee-weakening beauty. The every day is transformed into the miraculous; and the evening, the garden, this world, is replete with promise, “fat with an apple in its mouth.”

What I wanted when I looked at that painting when I was twenty-five years old was to be in it, to occupy the promise of it. And what I want when I look at it now is the same thing, only more: I want the people I love to be there, too. I want them with me in the garden, at the table, in the midst of all that light and darkness. I can’t think of anything else worth wanting.

“I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days”