"What if life were only moments..."

Moment #1: I was in a room with a beautiful hard-wood floor, wooden tables, bookshelves, and piano, lit by a dim but sufficient yellow-light lamp. The gleam of the homey light on the wood, combined with the smell of another delicious home-made dinner, gave the feel of being in a moment trapped in time, transcendent, ever-lasting, yet instantaneous, all at once. It's one of those moments where all you really remember is the feel and the mood of the place, not the events or the words. I was sitting at the piano, accompanying my cousin Evan as he practiced his violin (yet another piece of beautiful wood in the room). It was a simple song, played well, and played better each time. His diligence in practicing, my chance to help out, made it all feel like a home away from home. It was a moment filled with family, and beauty.

Moment #2: An old man, dignified by a masterful white beard, wheels an old woman, still lovely with her well-used smile, to my printing press in a wheel chair, accompanied by two faceless younger people. The woman wears large, dark glasses, but it takes me a minute to realize that she is blind. The man takes a card, I tell him to push down on the lever until it clicks, he pushes, and pulls out a freshly printed card with red ink that says, "I printed this at the Smithsonian!", accompanied by an ink picture of the Smithsonian castle. He smiles, looking at it, and gently leans down to the woman in the wheel chair, and reads the whole thing to her. She looks so at home with just the sound of his voice, so familiar, though she cannot see a thing. He looks back at me and says, "I've been her boyfriend for 63 years!" A prouder man I cannot imagine - she looks up at me and tells me that they have been married for that amount of time. As they wheel away, she reaches her hand out to me and clasps mine; I feel like all the love in her heart and the warmth in her smile travels through her farewell into my heart, my smile, my life. This is one of those encounters that, however brief, sticks with you and changes you. That old woman in the wheelchair with the beautiful smile will always be with me.

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me the source of this post's title.