BITTERSWEET

You know how they say that at the moment of your death, your life flashes before your eyes? Well, it seems to me that as we get older this begins to happen on a smaller scale. Now that much more of my life is behind me than ahead of me, I often find memories of the past intruding on my days. 

I will be taking a walk or pruning roses, when I will suddenly have an image of my teenaged self heading to the movies with my best friend to see A Hard Day's Night; or my 20-year-old self, sitting under a tree with a boy; or my 30-something self, composing a short story on a typewriter; or my 40-something self, hugging a young daughter; or my 50-something self, admiring my husband, with his dress-shirt sleeves rolled up.  Or I am sitting in a college classroom, bursting with the love of literature, imagining my life as a writer; or celebrating the birth of a daughter; or hunched over my computer, rushing to meet a deadline at work.

You get the idea.

The memory will be sharp, as if it were a photo lit by a flash. Like a sunset, it will linger for a few moments, and then it will be gone, leaving me with whatever it was I was doing before the memory filled my inner eye.**

This didn’t happen in my early and middle years, when the present crowded out most of the past, most of the time. But, now, memories are everywhere.  I will spend time with a granddaughter, and suddenly have an image of that granddaughter's mother as a baby.  I will start to read a book and remember another book.  

 

And, often, these days, I will see a face - on TV or on the street, anywhere, really - and be reminded of another face. I guess this makes sense.  There can only be so many variations on faces. The most startling moment of this sort occurred last week when I saw a picture of our new Congresswoman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, on the front page of our paper, and did a double take. Viewing her face in profile, I thought it was a picture of me. Let me hasten to add that Marie is 34. I am not 34, but I saw a young me in the photo.  I sent the picture to a few people who knew me when, and found that my reaction was shared. It was very unsettling.  (The photo, not their reaction. Sometimes I will watch a TV show or movie from years or decades ago and wonder what it is like for the actors to see themselves moving about in their younger incarnations.) 

 

And then there are the times when memories or faces don't intrude, when I actually invite them, as when I’m trying to fall asleep at night and I do what I call watching home movies. I will pick a moment in my life and call up scenes from that time and just hang out there for a while. 

 

And sometimes my memories feel like a deck of tarot cards that I can spread out on a table, picking up a few and pondering what they have to tell me. Was that a good decision?  Would I make that choice again?  How much would I give to relive that day? How does a particular memory inform a decision I must make today?

 

At times, memories bring me great joy and, at times, they bring regret or longing. Not too much regret though.  Of, course, there are things I profoundly wish I hadn’t done or had done differently, but if I were to undo any decision from my past, everything that followed would collapse.  Most importantly, I would not have the family and friends that surround me.  There would be a different family and group of friends, but this is inconceivable. And, so, I have learned to, mostly, accept my past.

 

Finally, there is this.  The older I get, the more the past and present seem to overlap and unspool at the same time. I am grateful to have lived long enough to have such a wealth of memories weaving through my present. 

 

And you, who read this post, may your regrets be few, and may your memories, however fleeting, bring you joy and peace. 

 

 ** Yes, I have written before about the intrusion of memories. https://woacanotes.blogspot.com/2019/09/fire-and-rain-on-time-travel-and.html   I guess I had more to say on the subject. 

 

 

 

TIME'S WINGED CHARIOT

  

         "But at my back I always hear 

          Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near . . ."

                                  - Andrew Marvell 

Can you remember a time when you were not conscious of time?

The last time I can remember not having a sense of time was the summer after third grade.  The days spread before me without end, and I inhabited each with no sense of the coming autumn.  I did not think about the next week or even the evening of the day I was living. I simply did not look ahead.  Now, I watch people read books, take classes, and meditate, trying to get to presence. But when I was eight, presence was all there was.

I don't know when I fell into time, but it was sometime after that summer.  Slowly at first, and then all at once, time took shape.  I learned to read a calendar and the calendar began to superimpose its grid onto my life.  

Still, the grid notwithstanding, before I had children, time generally moved at a stately pace. Days had a steady rhythm.  I look back and see life as a slow-moving river.  In contrast, when I look back at the years following the births of my daughters, I see a blur of swiftly moving water.  

On the rare occasions when I stopped to think about the future during those happy/crazy/filled-to-the-brim years, I assumed that when my girls were grown, life would return to its pre-child-rearing pace.   

Alas, it did not. 

So maybe it wasn't having children that changed my sense of time. Maybe it was something else altogether. 

Maybe it was technology.   

After all, it was during those (for me) post-baby years of the late '80s and early '90s that the whole world started to speed up.  First it was Fax machines.  Remember those?  Until they came along, I would receive a letter at work, consider it, maybe wait a day, then dictate a reply, which my assistant would duly type up and mail.  Now, clients would send the letter via fax and expect a response within hours.  

Things only got worse with email.  There was no longer a breather between the time a fax was sent and the time someone brought it to my desk.  Now the messages were showing up on my computer.  What was my excuse for not responding immediately?

But the real change came with cell phones.  If you have a cell phone, why can't you take a business call at home?  Or while on vacation? And then along came smart phones.  Great for taking pictures, but they also captured emails and texts.  Yikes.  

Look, I am not a Ludite.  I like my cell phone.  Most of the time.  I just don't like 24/7 anything.  I don't like the temptation to check for email or text messages when I am doing something that used to be all-engrossing.  I don't like the fact that I find it more difficult to concentrate than I did before all of these distractions.

I am very grateful that my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood were device-free.  I don't know how to tell those of you born after the dawn of the age of distraction what those pre-distraction days were like, but I will try. 

I see myself at about age ten,  playing on our dead-end street with my friends.  There was no impulse to run home and check my iPad for messages because there were no iPads.  I just played.  We just played. 

I see myself at around age 14, walking through the woods to a local library, lost in my own thoughts.  There was no buzzing in my pocket.  No stopping to respond to a text.  

I see myself again in my late 20s, when I would sometimes, while doing something interesting, unplug my phone.  (This was back when phones were tethered to the wall.)  From time to time, I forgot to plug it back in, only remembering when I realized I hadn't received a phone call for a couple of days.

And there I am as a young mother, nursing a baby, no smart phone to interrupt my returning her steady gaze.

In that pre-digital age, days were round and whole, not fragmented. If I was reading, I was reading.  If I was writing, I was writing. If I was with someone, I was with them.  I wasn't feeling a pull  to check my phone for texts or emails or voice mails.  

Of course, there is much that is wonderful about technology.  During the years my daughter Anne was living overseas, we talked weekly via Skype.  For free.  In real time. I could see her face as she spoke. What a gift. When my daughter Mara was in college, she would sometimes call me as she walked across her very large campus.  Long-distance charges were a thing of the past.  Another gift. 

I do love using texts to share photos or quick messages with friends.

And wouldn't I have liked texts or emails back when I was PTO president at my daughters' elementary school and had to use a phone tree to get a message to other parents?    

So, yes, technology is a double-edged sword, but acknowledging its plus side does not change the fact that it has (at least for me) sped up and fractured time.  With attention, though, I think it is possible to counter the fracturing.

I started this post by naming the summer after third grade as the last time I was unconscious of time.  Upon further reflection, I realize this is not true.  It takes more effort now, but there are moments--if I am lucky, hours--when I am engrossed in, say, writing or reading or gardening to the point where I am unaware of time.  This is not the natural state that it was during that long-ago summer.  But, if I turn off my phone and leave it in another room, I am sometimes able to step outside of time again.

And for that I am grateful.

                                                                                 Photo by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash 

WHAT DAY IS IT, ANYWAY? (and other pandemic questions)

In the last few years of her life, when she was in her 90s, my mother would sometimes call to ask me the time.  Although I have a few good years left before my 90s, I do find that the pandemic has left me also feeling a bit untethered from the usual markers of time passing. 

Sometimes I can't remember what day it is.  The other morning, I woke up thinking, "Is today Thursday or Friday?"  I decided to work backwards.  "Let's see, was yesterday Wednesday or Thursday?"  

I couldn't answer either question.

When I recounted this to a friend, she said, "I know what you mean. What we need are those day-of-the-week panties that we wore when we were little girls." 

Anyone else remember these?



Or maybe what we need are day-of-the-week socks.  That way, we could discreetly check the day without disrobing.

Of course, we would have to figure out which pair to wear on any given day.  I think the trick would be to check the day when putting on the first pair, then store the socks in order, carefully putting on the next pair each day.  (Just don't let anyone near the sock drawer, or we will all be doomed.)

And shouldn't time be passing sloooowly during this lockdown?  
How is it always Saturday?  Where do the weeks go?  Is the pandemic eating them?

And how is it mid-August already? Did we have a spring?  I can't remember.

Oh, yeah, and how about the fact that every time I look up, it is 3 p.m.? And speaking of 3 p.m., how am I always finding myself at that hour with nothing to show for myself?  Shouldn't I have accomplished one of the many projects I was always going to take care of when I had time?

Bonus question:  If time seems to be flying by, why does it feel like November 3 will never arrive?

These are pandemic mysteries that I will leave you to solve.  I, for one, am off to order some socks.