People From The Past

If it seems I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on reflections on reflections on the last 60 years of my life and the characters who inhabited them, it is nothing compared to the amount of mental time I have spent on them. It has been forcefully driven home to me this last year how very different I am from others in this, not only in the detail which I remember, but my familiarity walking with them in the present as if they were just here at dinner a few weeks ago, rather like the singer of the second verse of "The Ash Grove." They are amazed that anyone remembers that world and struggle to resurrect what I refer to with accuracy.  I am in turn amazed that this is not their normal neighborhood. I do have a few friends who experience something like it. But five years ago is only slightly more present to me than twenty-five or forty-five years ago.

In this way I see things both more clearly and less clearly than others. More, because I can easily draw a direct line from your actions in 1972 to 2022 and see parallels you are not likely to be happy to acknowledge.  Less, because I also project back what we know from 1995 or 2015 back onto 1975 with some sense that "we should have seen this then," and worse, that I did see it (I most likely did not - at all) but you did not, and why are you so surprised about this now? 

Forgiveness requires memory, because otherwise the narrative will be changed conveniently.  I have been quite uncomfortable about how many people get things wrong, not just in the sense of "That was 1979, not 1978, but in what the effect of an event was on others concerned. "She always resented me for moving us back to New Hampshire, but she was part of that decision too."  Well, yes, that and the affair you had about a year after getting back here. There's that.

Many people are long past being defensive about their choices and settled into disapproval or even contempt for those who made other choices. They tend not to see it, that they who focused on career want to talk only about the careers of others, for example. I will bet there are those who chose family who do the same - that is the common complaint about them from their single friends when young, which must be based on something - but I haven't seen it in anyone myself. And most of who I see move comfortably among topics, of medical issues complicating things, talking about houses, regions, and moving, referring to children or siblings in one breath and careers in the next.  I do have a hard time getting people to engage in more abstract topics, such as those I cover here, but that is hardly surprising. I sometimes ask point blank "So what have you been thinking about lately?" The offhand dismissal of whole categories of people not so far removed from them years ago does take my breath away at times. One expects the puffery and defensiveness at early reunions, when people are still jockeying and uncertain.  One expects more tolerance and curiosity later.

Whole sections of life are poisoned for people by the bad event that accompanied or followed.  I do partly understand that. Remembering the conversation of a friend who later betrayed you is less pleasant than it would have been otherwise. Less often, a terrible event is rescued by what came after to resolve it. But for me the moment was what it was, and all good times had pains in them, and there were moments of joy in even the worst of times. I happened to be thinking just this while traveling when I came across a related quote in CS Lewis's A Grief Observed: 

"One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself'. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea." Chap. 1, p. 12

There are no poisoned years for me, though one does come close. Nor are there very many poisoned people, perhaps none at all now. I can look back on their decisions and actions more kindly now, being aware of my own bad decisions and actions. I might even venture that those who have people they still hold entire grudges against are also those who seem not to admit to any faults themselves in the past. The blame always lay with others.  How did they ever hold responsible jobs, I wonder? It might be revealing to learn whether their coworkers also thought them so faultless or there was a trail of destruction behind them.