When I lived in Maryland, my Maryland (as the song goes), land of my actual ancestry with a mother from Middle River and a father from the Eastern Shore, there were many things to love and cherish.
I would say our house in the country was one of them, except that the building itself was a pile of crap and needed many tens of thousands of dollars poured into it, which we never had and never did. What moved my heart was the land itself, 2.57 acres in a long narrow piece, so that you could walk over a thousand feet in back of the house and end up in a thick patch of woods. Watching the trees and gardens come alive in the spring was a joy almost incomprehensible to me now. Sometimes I even miss the bugs.
For all I cared about that piece of land, however, it was really rather ordinary. Other places weren’t, and what I remember with the most exquisite longing were the woodland beaches along the river shore. Every cycle of the tides left a fresh clean stretch of unmarked sand, a new beginning with undiscovered treasures. The interface between water and land was rich and fascinating to me and filled my nostrils with the smells of my childhood.
As I sit here now, remembering a thing that’s gone, it’s as if I died, and everything went on without me. Which it absolutely did, of course, and would have done, even if I’d stayed there for the rest of my life and keeled over mowing the damn grass! The only difference between that eventuality and this one is that I’m still alive. I did die, in a sense, and now I’m reborn, or could be, if I would only take the hit and mourn. You see, I apparently haven’t allowed myself, not even after eight and a half years, to admit how much I miss some things I gave up when I “died,” probably because the pain would, um, kill me?? (Hey, wait a minute!)
But everything dies. The 35-year-old will never come back, either, nor would I wish him to. It is a puzzlement, but I do feel somewhat better already.
Related posts:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
The first law of cardio-dynamics is that we love what is ordinary and present in our lives more than what is distant and only imaginable. The second is that we love these ordinary things even more intensely when we have lost them forever. The third is that in loving these ordinary lost things, we get them back. –These are the paradoxes of the heart, as spoken by a clueless traveller in the deserts of his own heart.
Aaah, the past. Everything changes. I went back to the small hometown I grew up in for my 50th High School reunion.
The climate had changed, the town had changed, I think I had not changed. Suprisingly, my old classmates had seemed to not have changed (Those who were still alive). -
If you went back, I guarantee that those river beaches are not the same, the smell is not the same, and even the land has changed.
We miss that which no longer exists. -
Sorry for the pontification, but I couldn’t help it. -
Best regards, Joseph
Both excellent observations.
And Joseph, absolutely no need to apologize. You’re completely right about what I’d find if I went back.
Reunions bring you face to face with your own cloddish younger self. You’re suddenly surrounded by 60-year-old kids (Joseph is right about that) and can’t help being a kid yourself again – awkward, stupid, afraid, but also full of hopeful expectation. It’s psychologically an interesting situation. So interesting that I can’t seem to eradicate the one experience I had of it from my own psyche – I keep having dreams roughly springing from the setting of a reunion. If I had to try to put the experience in a nutshell, it would be this: that you feel kind of like you’re repeating your life, starting out all over again, as if those years hadn’t passed like a bolt of lightning. You feel like you’re now ready to fool around with those girls that knocked you speechless half a century ago. That’s definitely the stuff of dreams, definitely wish-fulfilment – mingled with pain, of course. Who hasn’t wanted to take a second shot at life? Who hasn’t dreaded being condemned to do it all over again? Reunions stir up those torturing thoughts.