Different Seasons: Four Novellas

by Stephen King

Time continued to pass—the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic.

“You know what he said to me? My old man? That he’d always been afraid of getting old—of being scared and hurting and all by himself. Of having to go into the hospital and not being able to make ends meet anymore. Of dying. He said that after the stroke he wasn’t scared anymore. He said he thought he could die well. ‘You mean die happy, Pap?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone dies happy, Dickie.’ He always called me Dickie, still does, and that’s another thing I guess I’ll never be able to like. He said he didn’t think anyone died happy, but you could die well. That impressed me.”

Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly . . . perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.