Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see—they’d make no larger claim. Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time. It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age’s defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.

I wonder what my golden age was? It seems you can only identify a golden age by when it has passed. You don’t know it until it’s gone.