THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

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.

 

                                    photo by Sandra Fs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

 

You've heard of the age of reason.  (Begins somewhere around age 7.)

And the age of consent.  (Varies from state to state.) 

Well, it would appear that I have reached the age of forgetting.  (Let’s put this one at over age 60.)  

Sure, I passed 60 some time ago, but I have only recently reached the point where I can't deny that I have reached the age of forgetting, of losing things.  

At least once each day, I lose my phone.  It's not really lost.  I know it's somewhere in my house. I just can't remember where.  Same with my earbuds – they walk off regularly.  (It is possible they are partying with the  socks that never emerge from the dryer with their partners.)

It wasn’t always so.  When my daughters were young, one or another of them would ask, “Where are my shoes?’ or “Where did I put my book?” or would shriek, “I can’t find my homework!”  I would pause and do what I called “the vision thing,” (thank you George H. W. Bush), and promptly respond, “Behind the big chair” or "On the table” or “Check your bedroom floor.”  I knew where everything was.

Sigh.

And then there is the issue of forgetting words.  Again, it's more losing than forgetting.  The words are in my brain somewhere. They generally return after hovering tantalizingly close to the surface of my mind for seconds or minutes or, occasionally, hours before emerging.  I have learned that it is counterproductive to try to force the word to make an appearance.  This only causes it to burrow more deeply into my brain.  But if I wait and pretend I don't care, it will eventually step out of its hiding place – usually without any warning. This can lead to some awkward exchanges  I might be talking with someone about, say, the weather when I startle that someone by suddenly and irrelevantly declaring, "japonica" or whatever word I had lost earlier in the day and suddenly remembered. 

  

image by absolutvision

(Is it a good sign that I know I have forgotten a word?  It would be worse, I suppose, if the word were so far lost that I didn't know I had ever made its acquaintance.) 

A couple of nights ago, while doing an acrostic puzzle,  I asked my husband to remind me of the name of the game with baskets on poles.  “Not jai alai,” I helpfully prompted. “The other one.”  

“Oh, yeah,” said he, and immediately lost the word. 

"The one that has become so popular on college campuses in recent years,”  said I.

He looked at me, stricken. Such a simple word and both of us had temporarily lost it.

Later the same evening, while we were talking about something else entirely, I suddenly cried out, “lacrosse.”  I had forgotten the earlier conversation, but the word jumped out anyway.  He was momentarily startled by my outburst, but we both went to sleep relieved and happy.

I had a similar experience while walking with a friend a week or two ago.  She was telling me about a book (I think -- it is possible that I am not remembering correctly), speaking with her usual easy fluency, when she suddenly lost a word.  "You know what I mean," she said.  "The word for wiping out a whole group of people."

"Oh yes," I said, "It's  . . ." and then I, too, promptly lost the word.  We figured we both knew what she was trying to say, and she went on with sharing her thought until I interrupted her just seconds later to later to cry triumphantly, "genocide!"  Not a word that should be spoken triumphantly, I might add.  (And now I remember, it was the Olympics and the Chinese government, not a book, she was discussing.)

So, does one person forgetting a word drive that word out of a companion’s head as well?  Is this a thing?

 

I wonder.

(It is interesting to me, that I rarely lose a word while writing.  Does this make me like the Alzheimer's patients who can sing, but not talk?)

Here's one that even youngish folk will have experienced - I will walk into into a room and forget what I was after.  Happily, this one is easily remedied by walking back to where I started to reboot my brain.

One more.  I used to have a great memory for conversations.  I still do.  It’s just that I can’t always remember who they were with, which leads to questions such as, “Did I tell you this already,” or “Have we talked about this?” 

On the other hand, I can hear one bar of a song that was popular in my teens or twenties and immediately identify the title and the singer.  The lyrics also flow forth easily as I sing along.

Very useful.

Really, though, this forgetting thing isn’t so bad.  I once read that if you forget where you put your keys, this isn’t a problem, but if you forget what they are for, you’re in trouble.  

So far, so good.   

FIRE AND RAIN; On Time Travel and Sombreros

           So, you’re going about your business, happy or not--thinking of something important or nothing at all.  And then it happens--the chance playing of a song that absolutely shreds you.  If you have been alive for, say, four decades, you have been around for long enough to know what I am talking about--the sudden intrusion of the past into your present.  The unbidden, unexpected injection of a powerful past emotion into your current life, bringing about a moment so charged you can hardly breathe.  

         This is not nostalgia, which my dictionary defines as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”  Nor is it to be confused with the purposeful playing of a song to bring back fond memories.  

         No.  There is no longing here.  No volition.  It is not an attempt to bring back the past.  It is the past breaking through—not a wrinkle in time, but the rending of time.        

         Anyone who says there’s no such thing as time travel is simply too young to have experienced this phenomenon.  For me, today, it was James Taylor’s Fire and Rain.   February 1970.  For those too young to remember, you can find it here.  

         I wish I could tell you why this song.  Why today.  I have loved James Taylor since I first heard him, and have loved this song, with its melancholy wistfulness, in particular.  The lyrics have always been evocative, and they mean even more to me now (at an age where the losses are piling up) than they did in 1970.  Still, I would not have predicted that the song would have the effect it had when I chanced to hear it today.  

         This wasn’t a reaction to the lyrics; this was me transported. This, from the first few notes, was me momentarily inhabiting my 20-year-old body and psyche, feeling a set of emotions I haven’t felt with precisely this sharpness in decades.  Of course, I have known fire and rain; there have been plenty of highs and lows.  But there is a quality of emotion that can only be felt by the very young when the world is new and everything is before them.  This was me at 20 again, if only for a moment.

         So, was the moment a blessing or a curse?  Maybe it was neither.  Maybe it was simply a glimpse at the nonlinearity of time; maybe it suggests that time runs in loops, rather than a straight line. 

         I’d like to think so. 

         The older I get, the less interested I am in straight lines and the more open I am to curves and loops and waves.  After all, there are few straight lines in nature; so, why should time hew to the linearity of our calendars?

         The poet Wallace Stevens understood the limitations of right angles and straight lines.  He had this to say:

         Rationalists, wearing square hats,

         Think, in square rooms,

         Looking at the floor,

         Looking at the ceiling.

         They confine themselves

         To right-angled triangles.

         If they tried rhomoids,

         Cones, waving lines, ellipses—

         As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—

         Rationalists would wear sombreros.

         

         And so I leave you with this wish:  May your sombreros be wide and round, and may your past break through just often enough to work some gentle curves into your straight lines. 

                           

 

         

          

         

DON"T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY

            As a teenager in the 1960s, I would sit with my father while he watched The Twentieth Century, a documentary TV show, narrated by Walter Cronkite, that focused on key moments of the preceding decades. In my recollection, there were a lot of episodes about World War II, or as everyone then called it, "The War."  My father, who did not watch much TV, would be riveted.  I realize now that he (born in 1912) was watching the events of his life as history.  

      I thought of this a a while back when Ken Burns' documentary about the Vietnam war began to unfold on television.*  I thought of it again when my husband and I went to see The Post, the Spielberg extravaganza about the Pentagon Papers.  And, before that, there was Selma.  The events of my life now qualify as history.  (Hell, the Beatles are now very ancient history.)

        This takes a bit of getting used to.  

        The first time I was aware that events of my youth had passed into history was the day in 2000 when I took my daughters to the Smithsonian, and we walked through an exhibit about First Ladies.  There was Jackie Kennedy in one of her famous outfits.  Wait.  What?  This is museum fare?  

        
        Of course, I should have realized that Jack and Jackie were now historical figures. Very few people in my workplace had any memory of JFK.  Indeed, when John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999, the young people in my office looked blank - I could see them thinking, why is this a big deal?  They didn't remember him saluting his father's casket.   

         Yes, when I gave it some thought on that day in The Smithsonian, I realized it had been nearly 40 years since Jackie had left the White House.  Still, she and Jack had been the first First Couple I had been really aware of.  

        When we are young, everything is immediate.  We are the world.  A minute later, another generation is stepping forward, and they don't remember - didn't even experience - the events that shaped our lives.  My mother's memories of WWII were as real to her as the lines on the back of her hands, but those memories were no more accessible to me than her mother's memories of WWI were to her.

          Is there a moment when life becomes history?  Is there a magic number of years? 20? 30? 50?  Is 9/11 history?  In a world where the 24/7 news cycle chews up and spits out stories before we have a chance to process them, is yesterday's news history?  

          And if yesterday's news is history, how will future historians sort out what is important and true about this moment in time when anyone (including yours truly) can place anything into the stream of data that passes endlessly before our eyes? Who will determine what was real and what wasn't?  Is a flood of postings any more reliable a guide in piecing together the past than ancient artifacts? I begin to seriously doubt it.  

          Our books and movies and periodicals and postings notwithstanding, all we ever really have is our own experience. (And even that may not be as reliable as we like to think.) So, may we pay attention to what we experience in our lives, and  enjoy and/or fix what we can while we are here, knowing that the light we shine to guide the next generation will fade, and trusting those who follow to pick through, and make the best of, what we leave behind. 

           May their memories be long, their wisdom plentiful, and their history eventful in the most positive possible way. 

         

* I couldn't bring myself to watch the Vietnam documentary.  It was hard enough to live through that time.