In a rare post, but true blogger fashion here is the rambling of my sleepless mind from last night. That's what bloggers are supposed to do, right? Spread their stream of consciousness across the web in a hopefully coherent fashion...
I sit ravaged by time, literally if only emotionally. I can feel time weighing down on me, squeezing every plane of my existence as I stand on the bottom of its ocean. The equal pressure of its all encompassingness squeezing me, crushing me until I can no longer breathe. I fear I will close my eyes and open them, as I imagine my mother has, to look into the eyes a married daughter and her own granddaughter, wondering where all those treasured baby days have gone.
Feeling time come at me from all directions overwhelms me, but it is its strength that leaves me sleepless. In its very dimentionality, it becomes a force at my back pushing me forward as my heels drag along the fabric of time leaving creases that hopefully those behind me will heed. Would it truly be so awful to have a Bill Murray like Groundhog Day experience. To wake every morning in the same point in time, knowing those you love and who love you will also wake to that day. To have a lifetime to memorize the little things like a wrinkle of a nose, the sly smile of a toddler with a thought, or the feel of an unanticipated hug. The thoughts that I can’t seem to hold on to day to day, month to month, let alone year to year. The precious memories that I would wrap in tissue and bubble wrap if they were tangible. Thoughts that would have a very special shelf, visible,but safe. But no these thoughts fall from my head like detritus from an overloaded wagon. These thoughts, the sound of my grandmother’s voice, the smell of my dad’s neck when he hugged me tight, the physical feel of nursing my newborn… those are lost in the blur of the pitter patter of my toddlers feet racing through the house. A memory which will be too will soon be gone when words go together in sentences, when thoughts become imaginative whimsy , when school starts, when boys take notice, when the bills for college come. Today will be swallowed up bythe tomorrows to become a long forgotten yesterdays. These thoughts I can’t hold in my head, but the horrid, embarrassing moments… those and their pointed corners and jagged edges stick in my brain to rattle about and keep me up at night twenty years later.
I fight back against the push of time with more than my dug in heels. Photos and videos, written accounts on this a media as stable as sky writing and etching in the sand, mark the progress of my family. But in sixteen years the hundreds of photos taken in just one year will be sorted to a mere two or three on a dusty shelf. A chipped coffee mug may live in a cabinet somewhere. An archive of outdated media that no one has a drive to support will hold the most fantastic year of my life. And eventually a suitcase of photos and disks will be sold, or understandably, but sadly, thrown away by a great great granddaughter who can no longer distinguish which member of her long gone family belonged to that cute baby picture. Such a tragedy lives in a suitcase in my attic. Family whose name went with my father. A pack of strangers that I feel a debt to, but no recognition. It will not be as difficult for my daughter to throw those in the bin. And that is the forward progress I fight with fervor and futility.
With equal force to the surge at my back, which I continue to resist, there is a tug forward to which I happily acquiesce. As though I had a choice, I move forward through time. I let my life, my child’s life wash over me and take joy in those grains of memory that get stuck between my toes, in my hair and anywhere else they may collect because there is apparently no room for them in my head. Occasionally, they shake loose and must magically fall from my toes to my ear, for out of the blue a brilliant crisp memory will pop into play like a video of my life. I will be happy with my grains of sand. And eventually I will fall asleep tonight and I will wake to a tomorrow and God willing, my family and I will wake to the day after that and day after day will pass whether I protest or not. And each day will hold a new joy, a new first. And things as mundane as washing baby toes, when done all on her own for the first time leaves me standing open mouthed with awe as if someone had performed magic in front of me. Not illusionist Vegas magic, but Alchemy, age of dragons, Harry Potter magic. That is the amazement that hits every time a first comes, not matter how large or small. It is the glory of your own baby to revel in the mundane and to want desperately to remember it.
So as time bares down on me continuing to make my heart heavy that I have to say goodbye to today and yesterday, I hear a little girl’s voice calling to me from the many tomorrows ahead. That makes me want to race ahead and see how it all turns out, but since I do not have the gift of Life Tivo, being able to record the minds eye and the added luxury of a another lifetime to watch it unfolded and savor it, I will simply hold that wee hand and as slowly as possible travel the path that Time is pushing me down.
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