The older I get the more I seem to be able to feel time move. I can sense its coming now, anticipate it like a wave in the ocean traveling steadily towards me—I can see its shape, imagine its impact, long before it occurs. But this wasn’t always so…
My children are growing up so fast. It’s really amazing to watch. It’s odd to think that I was there at the very beginning of their lives. I saw them-- red and flushed, pushing their way into the world, blinking swollen eyes in the new light. I saw them cry, smile, grow teeth, and gaze curiously at cartoon faces on plastic toys. Then they started to have memory… My first memory seems to be when I was four years old. I was at Nicolas Park in Jacksonville, Illinois, riding one of those iron circus animals with a big spring at the bottom, going back and forth. I can still feel somebody’s hand on my back and the sun bright in my eyes, filtered through tall, naked winter trees. Why I can’t remember anything before this is a mystery to me but it seems to work the same with my kids.
You live so much life before you start to keep memories. There is repetition-- favorite places and things, bad nights and good nights, sickness and health. There are enough days to get bored with and enough repetition to make a predictable person out of you. Leah and Caleb would nurse and look at Mama’s beautiful face, warm with little fingers grasping bigger fingers. They weren’t always these walking, playing, conversing little personalities that they are now. Caleb is five. He can’t remember being three. He can’t remember a house before this one. This of course means that, in a sense, he’s only been alive for two years. I’m sure his subconscious goes back further—his mother and I always there, like two omnipotent gods occupying a universe of so many rooms and a back yard. Two years of reference, two years of knowing your world, of knowing yourself-- not even a grain of sand in the span of time, but it’s enough.
I’m thirty-eight years old-- old enough to be thought of as a grown up but it wasn’t long ago that I made a similar entrance into the world. My brain fused with my surroundings and I started walking around, talking about things as if I knew something. None of us knows anything. Our existence is a wonder. Anyone who has gotten used to his own existence is already dead. So why does our own birth feel mysterious? Why does our own death feel mysterious? Where does the profundity come from? The fact that we wonder at all is the most mysterious thing. In a world full of growing and dying things, man alone is amazed at his process. We’re haunted by our childhood as if it were something strange-- as if no one in the world had ever been young or grown up before us.
Our first memories are usually the ones that haunt us most and they come upon us at unexpected times. Usually when I go to bed at night I have to lay there for about an hour or so before I fall asleep. My wife is blessed with the gift of sleeping pretty much when she decides to. She lays her head on the pillow and in just a few seconds I feel her leg kick a bit. She’s out. That fast. Not so with me. I’ll be on the very edge of sleep, monitoring my progress even at that surreal state, when something suddenly pulls me back into the waking world like a flush of cold water. It’s a memory, but not the kind you think of when you usually think of memory…
For example— one cold, February day when I was ten years old, I was watching television at my grandmother’s house when suddenly I received news that my mother had committed suicide. Right then and there, before I even got off the couch, I knew that this was one of “those moments,” the ones you and others will refer to as “pivotal.” You know it’s important immediately and you can almost hear the reference long before the actual moment has passed. You may not in fact feel much right then. Feeling is not the point. Something awful has happened and you bookmark it in your brain. If you’re going to be haunted by a memory in the middle of the night, a moment like this would certainly qualify as sufficiently haunting. But the memories that pull me from sleep are nothing like this— instead they are random, everyday and remarkably unimportant. Something like this… I’m in the tub. My brother has just gotten out. I have a few moments to myself while he puts on his pajamas in the next room. I’m sliding back and forth in the tub, this huge slippery space, curved to propel me back and forth as the water slaps and surges. My brother puts on a haunted house LP on our little record player in the next room. I can hear the chains rattling and the canned screams. Frankenstein’s feet thumping on the floor. I’m not scared but my stomach tickles a bit. There are shampoo bottles on the side of the tub. The one called “LOVE” has a big ball for a screw top. Orange/brown color. Sleek in a seventies kind of way. You can always tell the decade you’re in by the shampoo bottle design. Mom is somewhere helping my brother. I have a Fisher-Price “Three Men in a Tub” boat bobbing along with me. I see faces in the fake marble tile. Popeye. The Wolf-man…
And suddenly I’m awake-- lying there next to my wife, staring into nowhere in our dark room. How odd that this little scrap of memory should pull me so fast from sleep as if I were Saint John receiving a vision of the Apocalypse. But it wasn’t the Apocalypse—it wasn’t anything close. It was, in fact, a non-event. But the result upon me was devastating, almost bringing me to tears as I lay there in the dark. Why was this happening? Was it just the mechanics of my brain firing randomly, like a glitch in my computer? Was the soft tissue in my skull weighed down with too much information? Certainly this must be why old people constantly chatter on about how things used to be—their brains are like hard drives, full and on the brink of crashing. There are simply too many memories to keep up with—houses and yards, faces, errands and hair cuts, countless little meals and conversations all stacked up, one on top of another. Maybe when we’re drifting off to sleep our minds are finally free enough to attempt defragmenting it all. Perhaps certain memories escape randomly, causing us to be transported to a different place and time. While this certainly might explain what happened, it still doesn’t explain my reaction to it. I fear I’m too nostalgic for my own good. It somehow feels irresponsible to put so much emotion into so small a memory. Talking with people I find that either this sort of thing happens to you or it does not. If it doesn’t you couldn’t imagine a more bizarre waste of thought or time. If it does, it feels like the most important stuff in the universe.
Now that I’m a father I watch my kids wade through their own times. They’re too young to be really reflective about the whole thing, but still I watch them. I try to guess which will be their little moments, the ones that will haunt them in adult years. Every morning my daughter Leah feeds a couple of stray cats that hang out by our back door. She communes with them daily before getting out of her pajamas and starting school. Caleb is always making castles out of our couch cushions. He nuzzles inside the cozy walls with a comic book and a couple of plastic pirates. Maybe when my kids are older, after they’ve gotten married and gotten jobs, they’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about these things. More than likely they’ll dismiss it as nostalgia, or blame it on middle age and melancholy. But maybe they’ll puzzle over it as I have-- maybe they’ll wonder why such a mundane moment could feel so haunted, so holy.
Perhaps these moments haunt us because of how uncomplicated they are—couch cushion castles, cats waiting for you at the back door, sliding back and forth in a draining tub… If there’s ever a time in our lives when we are completely happy, it is during these times. Maybe it’s the bliss of self forgetfulness that we love-- the joy of coming out of yourself. This is happiness before you felt what you were and wanted to make changes. It’s the joy (maybe only lasting a split second) of feeling no lack in yourself or in the world. We work hard for moments like these and perhaps they come every once in blue moon, like fragments from a ship wreck washing onto the shore-- flotsam and jetsam. We pick them up, grateful for the discovery but sad for what they remind us of – that we’re castaways. They pacify us and they awake urges that make the rest of our lives seem unsatisfying. They make us happy and sad. We are eased by their coming and haunted by their coming-- they remind us of what joy is and what the lack of joy is. Most of all, they aggravate the part of us that wants desperately to be happy, a thing we’re not sure even exists in our world.
In G.K. Chesterton’s short story, Manalive, an overweight middle aged man, appropriately named Innocent Smith, takes a few reluctant disciples with him up to the roof of their apartment to drink a bottle of mediocre Bordeaux. What they discover is that even a bad wine tastes somewhat magical when consumed in an unusual setting. One particularly jaded young man can’t help but notice the difference. He speculates that his cheap cigarettes might taste better on a couple of stilts or even from the top of a tree! I’ve had a similar experience. Once, during a summer I spent on my grandmother’s farm, I enjoyed a bowl of canned peaches inside a makeshift tent my cousins and I created out of sheets we hung out on the line. I still remember the wind whipping those bright panels and the muted sunlight, the taste of those peaches and drinking the heavy syrup from my bowl. I remember how my cousins and I found each other unusually funny that afternoon-- stupid knock, knock jokes and silly faces. Our improvised surroundings enchanted everything and, for an hour or two that summer day, we found ourselves in fairyland. It’s a strange magic indeed that can make a cheap slice of Del Monte peach taste like the fruit of paradise. Even the pleasure of our own company was transformed into something beyond the ordinary. We were witty-- the words came out like cream! And we were abnormally generous to each other, letting each be funny in their turn and doing our part to laugh along. Every comment or joke made in that tent received ten times more laughs than they deserved. Ultimately this is why people go on picnics. It’s not just to be outdoors-- it’s to make your friends more agreeable and your food taste better. Potato chips and Dr. Pepper always taste better outside.
Recapturing the romance of being alive is what this is really all about-- doing an old thing in a different way. This has become like a religion for some people Whatever it takes to wake us out of our coma, that’s what we’ll do—even if it means skinny dipping, jumping out of an airplane, or smoking cigarettes on stilts. We want to feel alive in the moment, not forever pining over the past or the future. We want to recapture what we experienced best in childhood—the all encompassing “now” of things. But this can escalate to ridiculous proportions. An office worker on his break simply can’t drag out the stilts every time he goes for a smoke. It’s impossible to continually think up new ways to shock ourselves into “living for the moment.” Eventually you’ll run out of ideas or become so warped in your methods that you end up leaving the realm of sanity. Sex has perverted itself in this way. At the end of the day, sex is no more complicated than fitting tab A into slot B, but it’s the euphoria that we want-- and that, at best, is intangible.
We taste things early in our lives that leave us wanting, longing for those flashes of joy that made all other life look pale and sickly. We remember running across green lawns at dusk with fire flies miraculously appearing in glory and fading just as fast. Quiet times on porches, watching rain fall. Alone times with toys, silent games, and stories in your head. Christmas before you knew what Christmas was—little lights, little worlds. Books with illustrations that were suddenly waiting for you at the turn of a page. Pencil and paper and faces you drew, the quiet joy of making something just to make it, not knowing or caring when you’d be done with it or what it was for. We want to do it all again but we can’t reverse engineer these moments. Setting up all the particulars and technically doing the same things again won’t bring about the same joy. There are few things more pathetic than trying to engineer your own meaningful moment. And this is another disconnect, another tragedy of the Fall. There is a life we feel we ought to have but somehow can’t have. And we can’t just dismiss our appetite for it, see it as unrealistic and go onto other things. The hunger pangs won’t let us. In a way, wanting for this happiness is all that we ever do. We have always and only wanted those simple moments to last forever, but it can’t be done and we spend the rest of our lives mourning this fact. Motivational speakers constantly dangle the carrot of self fulfillment in front of our noses but all they’ve done is discover that money can be made from such longings, like a mortician suddenly discovering death. No matter what any author, guru, preacher, or daytime television host might tell us, the joy that eludes us will continue to elude us just as it did Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen or anybody else who has ever lived a thoughtful moment on the earth.
The gap tells us something. It speaks of a time when there was no gap. We are like men without legs who dream of stems that could carry us along. We are hungry in a world where food doesn’t exist, so we redefine hunger to mean something else. The urges of consciousness are pulling and prodding us toward a horrible and embarrassing fact-- a tragic event in our history that won’t go away no matter how flippant, glib, or jaded we become. It is, in fact, our sorry obligation in this world to ache and to bleed and yearn-- to know the contrast of what was meant to be and what, unfortunately, is…
Flotsam and jetsam-- pieces and shreds of paradise continue to wash upon the shore. And every morning we’ll rise and wander the beach of our days, hoping for the elation of another discovery, another piece of what was somehow lost long ago.
