I am thinking of a woman I met at a lake on a summer’s day a very long time ago. Was I 21 that summer? I know it was the summer I had suffered a broken heart--a broken heart of the kind only a 21-year-old can know, the kind that leaves one unable to eat, breathless with the impossibility of moving forward.
Of course, I did. Move forward, that is. There was an eventual reconciliation, followed by a final breakup. But that is not the subject of this post, and, anyway, both occurred after that day at the lake.
How did I meet her, the woman at the lake? I was probably working for a temp agency for the summer. Would they have sent me out for a turn as a mother's helper? They must have. Why else would I have been at a lake, herding young children, while their 30-something mom visited with her friends?
She was pretty, the woman, and, in my eyes, worldly. I don’t remember her name. I do remember that she and her friends spoke fondly, if a bit flippantly, about their husbands. I, still carrying around my shattered heart, doubted I would ever meet a man about whom I might banter with friends, let alone one I would marry.
In any event, a memory of this woman and her friends resurfaced this morning. I could still see the way she appeared to so comfortably inhabit her life, the casual ease with which she addressed her children. She was the perfect illustration of a future, which, all those years ago, seemed out-of-reach to me.
Why I was concerning myself with such a future at age 21 is a subject for another time. Suffice to say that although I had fully embraced second-wave feminism by the summer of ’71, I had yet to leave the lessons of a 1950s childhood entirely behind.
But I digress. What struck me this morning was the fact that she, if she is still alive, must be in her eighties. I am having trouble wrapping my brain around this transformation. I cannot make the mental leap across 50 plus-years to picture what she might look like now.
Here’s the thing. Those we see regularly age along with us. We do not notice the changes, unless we look back at a photo from two or three decades ago and see that, yes, they (and we) have grown older. Even so, the sight of our long-time friends does not shock us in the way a photo on social media of someone we have not seen since high school might startle.
What are we to make of those who have aged out of our sight? And why does someone I met so briefly and so long ago come back to me so clearly? I think I will leave her there at water's edge - no need to age her forward.
(I’ll let you in on a little secret. I'm inclined to believe our younger selves live on. Perhaps past, present, and future are not distinct. Perhaps when I leave my body to enter the great mystery, I will learn that time is but a construct, erected to protect us from what our finite brains cannot process.
I would like to think so.)
I don’t think I ever saw the woman by the lake again. Either it was a one-day assignment, or the rest of the week has been buried under the accreted memories of 50 years. Whichever it is, she has not left me. Her younger self lives on in my mind, as I hope my younger self lives on in the minds of one or two people who have not seen me for 50 years.
Perhaps, as we age, we carry the past for one another.
I wish this for us all.
