Some dates arrive heavy
~ not with regret, but with memories of everything they set in motion
No regrets, no edits ~ some dates keep speaking long after they pass
Some dates do not simply return, recur and remind …
They arrive each year, carrying whole decades.
I do not regret what began 54 years ago, but I would be lying if I said it came without cost. Not the cost of the joy, not the price of anything, not the expenditure of time, with anyone, or with time spent alone.
Some dates do not arrive quietly.
They show up carrying boxes.
This one does that for me every year. Fifty-four years ago, something began on this date, and I do not need to name it to feel its weight. What followed was never a simple story of good times and bad times.
There were ample quantities of those, of course, but there were always the mind-wanderings of ‘what if’ … about this and that and then and when and why and why not …
That is too small, too neat, for any real life.
It was full … so many parts I recall as if they were yesterday. And I’m including yesterday.
But all was not full of constant or long periods of sustained joy, sadness, luck, mistakes, love, distance, repair, and consequences, but the memories, the vignettes that show up when triggered, that kept unfolding long after the first moment passed.
Today, I am not polishing my memory. I am simply respecting the life that followed, after every choice, decision, avoidance, mind-change or mistake-reflection.
Do you have a date like that, one that walks into the room before you do?
I have no regrets, but I do have memories, and some of them bite …
Some are warm enough to rest in. Some still sting when they show up uninvited. Most arrive as the kind of bundle most of us carry in our baggage compartment: children, grandchildren, work, play, travel, adventure, cheap lessons, expensive lessons, and painfully expensive tuition paid to life itself.
At times, the memories of so many years feel like a noisy, heavy tank’s tracks rolling over plans, pride, and certainty, and over me.
And yet, there I was later, getting up, brushing off the dust, and carrying on as if that was standard procedure.
Maybe, in a lived life, it is.
Nostalgia, if it is honest, is not a museum. It is an audit. It shows what was made in us, what was unmade, and what still deserves gratitude after all the wear and tear.
So today, I remember the whole thing, not just the polished parts.
Seriously, I’m not packing anything away or hiding; if any reader wants more specifics, if that will be helpful to you, please write to me, and I’ll help if I think it is right. Otherwise, there are lifetime of actions, reactions and other parties who would likely, as I do, prefer to keep the facts, dates, names, and relationships involved, private.
Some dates do not ask us to celebrate or mourn, only to tell the truth about what they changed in us. I was 20. Now I’m 74. It’s as if it were all yesterday, 54 years of todays that look you in the face every morning, and they always pass into past, and sometimes that’s tense!