” ‘Isn’t it sad,’ she said, ‘How the young folks are drifting away? Why, Sissy hardly comes home at all since she married.’ “
“It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.”
Through the use of flashbacks in the novel, readers really see how time passes and changes people, sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse. The events in the novel are interspersed with flashbacks of Maggie and Ira’s life at earlier times. Some of the flashbacks occur in the recent past, but others occur in the more distant past, when Maggie and Ira first got married. The flashbacks show how the two of them have changed as they age, and how their marriage has changed as well.
Maggie and Ira started dating by mistake. One of the neighborhood gossips told her that Ira had been killed during army training, and since Maggie had been one of his acquaintances during school, she decided to send his father a condolence letter. As it turned out, Ira did not, in fact, die during military training; it was another boy in the neighborhood who had passed away. And thus Maggie and Ira began their sometimes tumultuous relationship.
At first they were very in love, and very naive. But over the years, as the passage of time started to put stress on their marriage, things changed. They became part of the “older” generation, looking at the younger people having the same fun they were having thirty years before. They start to nag at each other when they’re together:
“That Ira is just so stubborn I could spit.”
“And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn’t stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second or third chances to get it right.”
The trip to the funeral and the video that is shown there remind them of the past and help the two of them realize that there is a reason they got married in the first place. They realize that even though time has passed and they how grown older, it is no reason for them to grow apart.
