If we think of ourselves as houses, the wake-up calls we get in life can tap our roofs in pebbles, heave stones through our windows, or crush our entire framework with immense boulders. Considering such a figurative spectrum, sometimes we're inconvenienced and other times nearly destroyed. From these places of despair, we are pressed to remodel, reconstruct, or buy new windows to replace shattered glass depending on the gravity of our wake-up call. The "call" I received the other night is what I'll attempt to explain in the lines that follow:
It would seem a simple task to write a composition for a French class. Mine in particular was to regale the reader with what I deemed, during my youth, to be my favorite meal. I could have spent the 250-word requirement on cheese pizza, but when I really thought about it I came up with something a bit more meaningful. Wintertime meals at Babcia's house. (Babcia translates to "grandmother" in Polish, to be noted by my non-Pole readership)
And what a treat it was to experience a visit to chez Babcia! The ice tea was always sweet and tangy, the roast chicken always perfectly cooked, the linzer-tarts nutty and jammy, and the gravy...well the gravy was simply otherworldly. I wrote about all of this in French, hoping that my use of the imperfect and the composed past tenses jived and my adjectives agreed with their nouns in gender and number. But when I came to my last sentence, all of this "regaling" brought me to tears after I typed the following line:
C’est triste maintenant qu’elle s’est tombée gravement malade et elle ne peut plus cuisiner.
"It is sad, now that she has fallen gravely ill and can no longer cook." So maybe it's not perfect French, but a Frenchie could definitely see where I was going. These words became figurative stones, thrown right through each and every one of my windows, leverage courtesy of guilt. The places and spaces I described in my composition were my days of good family eats: before my parents were divorced, before I knew the ways in which world politics wreaked havoc on our lives, before chronic illness immobilized a special woman in my life. Ignorance was such bliss. And in my case, it was a tasty bliss. But "bliss" no more it would seem.
If you've ever had a relative diagnosed with a terminal illness, or know someone who has had a family member diagnosed with one, you'll find that no one really deals with the situation in the same manner. In my case, I chose to stick my head in the proverbial sand and pretend it wasn't happening and that the experience would soon come to a close. I didn't want to hear that my grandmother couldn't remember who I was, nor did I want an account of her last horrible fall down the stairs. What a coward is this man, I say.
Sticking my head in the sand not only fractured my relationship with my grandmother, but also fractured my relationship with a past I can revel in. All things pass and life is not static, no matter how sandy our hair gets. But as we reflect on the past, we sometimes see something we didn't before. If we're of the olfactory sort, a smell sometimes triggers a sensory memory of a certain place. And for the more visual or auditory soul, the mystery of déja vu feelings lend the sensation of, "I've been here before: in this exact moment, place, and time."
The flood of memories I experienced completely paralyzed me. Every single visit to the mall carousel, every trilled laugh, every preparation of the dog's dinner: I allowed this woman come alive in my head in such a lucid way. A professor once told me that nostalgia was an unnecessary glorification of a fictitious past, but I beg to differ on so many levels Professor Katz! We have every reason to glorify and place importance on our memories--almost an obligation. So let's take a closer look, shall we?
We can very deeply internalize the values hidden among our memories, good and bad. The types of lovers we won't soon seek again, the places we return to for pleasant nostalgia, and advice we disregarded now actualized, initially thinking ourselves the wiser. There is no greater bounty than the treasures of our past, in the ways they shape our current reality and self. We must in turn be able to equate the experiences of burning our hands on the stove and for the first time producing a delicious feast from that very same appliance--in both instances we learn, we experience.
One might say that those who disregard history are doomed to repeat it. Verily, I say. I merely suggest that we examine our own histories, our own memories: going local instead of global for a moment. Where did I fracture something, and where did I shed light? What moments did I come at someone from a place of hate, and when love? Life is simply too short, and too quickly allows for a growing list of things we "should" have said or done.
Memories can so effectively inform our decisions, so why not hold onto the good, the bad, and otherwise ugly souvenirs of life?
I know living in the moment is really big right now. It's hard to browse the self-help section without seeing something about living in the "now." I'm not asking for anyone to live anywhere else in the temporal continuum. What I think might be helpful, though, is an occasional glance rearward to make sure we aren't destroying anything in our wake. And of course, a glance forward in good health and clear conscience doesn't hurt, either.
In community,
David
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