1967

Last night summer seemed unwilling to end.

It lingered over the streets in that warm, suspended way certain evenings have, as though the day had forgotten its obligation to disappear. The light outside the windows of Suzette’s was thinning slowly, reluctantly, while Eva and I sat over dinner and allowed the evening to drift around us.

Suzette’s is one of those places that has long since ceased to feel like a restaurant to us. We know its rhythms, its little ceremonies, the familiar arrival of plates and glasses, the voices floating from nearby tables. Sheila, our regular waitress, moved through it all with the quiet certainty of someone who belonged to the place.

It was an ordinary Tuesday evening. Or rather, it still believed itself to be one.

At some point Sheila told us about a bottle sleeping downstairs in the cellar. A Château Franc Mayne from 1967.

The last one.

Those words immediately gave the bottle a peculiar gravity. The last one. As though somewhere below us, beneath the conversations and clinking glasses, beneath the ordinary commerce of dinner, a small survivor from another age had been waiting in the darkness for someone to summon it upstairs.

Of course I said yes.

And presently it appeared.

There are objects whose age is merely a number, and others upon which time seems to have settled physically, like dust in an abandoned room. This bottle belonged to the latter kind. Its faded label seemed less printed than weathered, as though those four numbers had been carried across some enormous distance.

I knew perfectly well what we had ordered. And yet, sitting there with the bottle between Eva and me, I found myself returning to that date.

Four years before I was born.

For four entire years this wine had already existed somewhere in the world before I arrived in it. It had begun its journey through time before I had begun mine.

That thought opened something. Suddenly the years between that bottle and our table seemed to unfold backward, one behind another, like rooms in an impossibly long house.

Fifty nine summers. Fifty nine autumns. Fifty nine Christmases.

And somewhere at the far end of that corridor was another summer.

Saint Émilion, 1967.

I began to imagine it. The vineyards lying beneath the heavy gold of late August. The sun lowering itself lazily over the fields. Dust suspended above narrow roads. Cicadas filling the afternoon with their endless mechanical song. Rows of vines disappearing toward the horizon, heavy with fruit.

Perhaps there was that peculiar stillness of late summer when the season has reached its fullness and already contains, somewhere deep within itself, the first secret knowledge of autumn.

The grapes hung there beneath the Bordeaux sun. Waiting.

Men and women moved among the vines, their hands darkened by work, their clothes carrying the smell of earth and sweat and crushed fruit. They talked. They laughed. Someone complained about the heat. Someone thought about supper. Someone worried about money. Someone was in love.

How strange that they should seem so distant to me now.

And yet they were simply living.

That may be what moves me most when I imagine them. They did not know they were living in the past. Nobody ever does. For them, 1967 was not history. It was now. The afternoon was simply an afternoon. The harvest was work that needed doing. Evening would come. They would wash their hands. They would go home. Someone would pour wine. Someone would kiss a child goodnight.

Perhaps one of those men was young. Perhaps he had his entire life ahead of him. Perhaps he lived another fifty years. Or more. Perhaps somewhere along the way he became an old man who occasionally remembered that particular harvest, although by then most of the details had disappeared and only the heat remained, or the smell of the earth after sunset.

Perhaps he is gone now. Almost certainly, many of them are.

The wine remembers.

The grapes were taken from the vines and carried away. They were crushed, fermented and transformed, and eventually something of that summer was sealed inside glass at Château Franc Mayne.

Then the bottle disappeared into time.

It crossed the Atlantic. At some point it belonged to an importer in San Francisco. After that, the trail goes dark. And perhaps that darkness is appropriate. I prefer not knowing. It allows me to imagine the bottle passing silently through the decades like some insignificant object in a fairy tale, changing hands while nobody understood the journey it was making.

Perhaps it slept beneath a house for twenty years. Perhaps someone bought it and forgot about it. Perhaps it survived a marriage and a divorce, the birth of children, the death of parents, a move across the country.

Perhaps someone held it in 1985 and almost opened it. Not tonight.

Perhaps in 2012 someone brushed the dust from its shoulders, looked at the year and returned it to the darkness. Still not tonight.

And so the bottle continued forward while the world around it kept disappearing.

Men walked on the moon. The Berlin Wall rose and fell. Cities changed their faces. Music came and went. Children became parents and parents became photographs. Houses were built and demolished. Restaurants opened, filled with laughter for years, and vanished so completely that eventually even the people who remembered them began to disappear.

And through all of it, somewhere in the dark, the bottle waited.

There is something almost unbearable in that thought. We imagine time as something that moves. Perhaps it is we who move. The objects remain for a while and watch us pass.

When Sheila finally poured the wine, I watched it enter the glass. It was darker than I expected, still carrying a deep garnet color at its center, thinning toward amber where it touched the light.

For a moment I simply looked at it. Nearly sixty years had become a few ounces of liquid in my hand. I lifted the glass. There was earth in it. Old wood. Dried fruit. Something faintly floral. And underneath it all, something I cannot name without sounding foolish.

Memory, perhaps.

Not mine.

That was the strange part.

A memory of a summer I had never lived.

When I tasted it, I expected to think about the wine. Instead I thought about time. It was still there. That astonished me more than anything. Something that had begun beneath the sun four years before I was born had survived long enough to reach me. I was about to take a sip of a summer that had ended before my life began.

For an instant, the distance between 1967 and our table seemed absurdly small. Some minute residue of all of it had survived, imprisoned in glass, waiting almost sixty years to be released. And now it was sitting between Eva and me.

Perhaps that is why I began drinking it slower. Every sip diminished it. The bottle that had survived fifty nine years could not survive us. There was something almost ceremonial about that realization. Owner after owner had protected it from this moment. Someone had stored it carefully. Someone had carried it from one place to another. Someone had looked at it and decided to wait. And now there would be no more waiting.

I remembered what Sheila had said.

The last bottle.

There may be others somewhere in the world, sleeping beneath old houses or resting in private cellars among thousands of other bottles. But this one had reached the end of its journey.

Strangely, I did not regret opening it. Quite the opposite. It suddenly seemed to me that keeping it closed would have been the greater sadness. Because what is the purpose of preserving something forever? Someone planted those vines. Someone tended them. Someone stood beneath the late summer sun and picked those grapes. Someone made the wine. Someone filled this bottle and sealed it.

Surely all that waiting had to be waiting for something. And perhaps it was waiting for nothing more extraordinary than this. A table. Dinner. A warm summer evening. My wife sitting across from me. Two people talking and laughing while an old bottle slowly emptied between them.

And then another thought came to me. How many evenings of our own lives have already disappeared exactly this way? How many dinners? How many summers? How many conversations that seemed ordinary because we did not yet understand that one day we would give almost anything to enter them again?

That may be time’s greatest deception. It hides inside the ordinary. It passes while we are looking elsewhere. We almost never recognize the important moments while they are happening because they arrive without music, without announcement, disguised as Tuesday evenings and dinners and drives home and conversations we assume we will have a thousand times more.

Only later do they reveal themselves. By then they belong to memory.

The people who harvested those grapes could never have imagined us. They could not have imagined Suzette’s. They could not have imagined Eva sitting across from me or Sheila bringing their wine to our table. And I could never know them. Yet for one evening our lives touched.

The same earth.

The same grapes.

The warmth of the same sun.

A summer afternoon in Saint Émilion returning, impossibly, on another warm summer evening almost sixty years later. Perhaps that is the peculiar magic of old wine. It makes time tangible.

Normally time has no body. We know it only by what it steals from us. Children grow taller. Faces change. Parents grow old. Photographs accumulate in drawers and phones. Familiar places disappear. One day we notice that people who once filled our lives now exist mostly in stories.

But that evening time had a body. I could hold it by the stem of a glass. Harvest of 1967 was there. I could look at it. I could smell it. I could taste it. And, sip by sip, I could watch it disappear.

There was no putting it back.

By the time the final glass was poured, fifty nine years had narrowed themselves to a few remaining small sips. The bottle stood empty on the table. I looked at it and felt an unexpected sadness. Not because the wine was gone. Because for a moment the bottle had revealed the trick. This is what time does to everything.

Summers end.

Children grow up.

People grow old.

Places disappear.

The people sitting across from us at dinner will not always be there. Neither will we. And perhaps the answer is not to fight this. Perhaps the answer to impermanence is not to keep everything safely unopened. Perhaps it is exactly the opposite.

Open it.

Drink the wine.

Take the trip.

Have the dinner.

Say what needs to be said.

Stay a little longer.

Look across the table at the person you love and understand, if only for an instant, to see what time usually tries so hard to conceal from us.

This is it. This ordinary evening. This conversation. This glass. This summer. Because some things survive only long enough to arrive at the right table, on the right evening, with the right person.

Last night, this one did.

Outside, the warm summer night had settled over Suzette’s. Eva was still sitting across from me. And somehow a summer that had ended in Saint Émilion four years before I was born had found its way into ours. For a little while, almost sixty years seemed like nothing at all.

Then we drank the last of the wine. And 1967 disappeared again.