And there are more I remember
And more I could mention
Than words I could write in a song
But I feel them watching
And I see them laughing
And I hear them singing along
Lyle Lovett, Family Reserve, Joshua Judges Ruth
Periodically, I find myself remembering my high school days and wondering where everyone I then knew has gone and what they might have been doing during the intervening years. This process has a certain unfailing rhythm: I spend a day or so trying to track down persons with whom I have lost touch and who played some role in my life back then, only subsequently to wonder why I have been wasting my time doing so after coming (once again) to the realization that the only certain thing we then had in common was that we were all captives of our genealogy and the same small town.
We all seem to have some level of fascination with our youth. In some ways, such a fascination seems inevitable: in the restricted view of the rear view mirror, youth was a time of relative ease whose adolescent cares now seem superficial, in retrospect its time seems elastic, and it had a future untainted by our present knowledge. Why not remember those days with a fondness tinged with a sense of ”what if” or the more draconian ”if only”? After all, the glass in the rear view mirror is far from perfectly cast and its resulting physical distortions might only enrich memory at the expense of life’s present realities.
A day or so of wallowing in such memory is all I can usually stand. I eventually realize that some person from the past upon whom I have become sufficiently fixated to spend time searching his or her whereabouts was, in truth, much more of an acquaintance than a true friend. I eventually come to the realization that my teenage cognitive powers were singularly impaired by lack of worldly experience and an excess of glandular enthusiasm. In short, what I really know about most of these folks is so trivial as to amount to no measurable knowledge whatsoever and for me to imagine that we might have something in common after almost 50 years is nothing more than a giant leap of faith.
Once I reach this point in the cycle, I turn again to the future and my mantra of “don’t look back; look forward”. I heartily believe in this mantra and have found many an occasion to chant it during a long life. Fascination with the past seems to me to have little to offer for the future: hurtful experiences in the past can only continue their harm through the practice of continual reminiscence; glorification of the past inevitably detracts from the blessings of the present by obscuring those blessings through the lens of wishful thinking; a constant, sharp backward focus causes stumbling by distracting us from the realities of the present.
To every mantra, of course, there are exceptions. I do have longstanding friends from those days whom I know well due to the knowledge acquired over the long intervening years. With these friends, our long ago youth formed the basis for a long adult relationship and we can look back together on our shared past with humor rather than longing.
Similarly, events of my past had, and some cases may still have, lessons to teach me in the context of the present. This is particularly true of the joyless events that come with every life which, because of their inherent angst, can only be profited from by lessons learned well. While I have always worked hard to learn those lessons in order to avoid similar pitfalls or pratfalls, I sometimes find that either there was more to be learned than I was first aware of or that I didn’t learn their lessons as well as I might have. In either case, I have to be taught by them again.
But reminiscence is not all bad if done occasionally and without regret for where you presently stand on life’s road to an unknowable future. This is especially true of reminiscence done with a sense of humor, for if you share with others a common understanding of the concept of “imperfection”, you can laugh together over the unique or shared foibles and pratfalls of long lives.
The occasion for this entry is the realization that in two short years I will be faced with the decision of whether or not to attend a fifty year high school reunion. This was brought home by a recent Facebook posting made by a Facebook “friend” – a woman I now realize I have long known but little know. How could I? She still lives in the small Eastern Washington town where I grew up, and our paths parted sometime during that last, far off Summer following our high school graduation. While I have no reason to think anything other than that she is a charming, well-educated, professionally successful woman, I have no real understanding of who she has become in her passage through the well of experience or of what those experiences might have been. The same is equally true of our respective knowledge of our fellow classmates – or of her understanding of me.
Reunions have never been an important part of my life and I usually refuse to attend them. I might well choose to miss this one, but in contemplating that choice I am reminded of the singular lesson learned from my fortieth law school reunion about which I have written elsewhere on this blog. But since this choice lies in my future, I will simply have to cross that bridge when, or if, it presents itself. At this point on my road, I must look forward, not back.
I have once again arrived at the point of understanding that I can never see the past clearly through the imperfections of the rear view mirror, and I choose not to spend more time today focused upon those long ago years. For I truly believe that it is only in starlight that we can see and appreciate a singular past with any real clarity, and, even then, we can only see as much of that past as the exigencies of distance, time, space and earthly serendipity allow.
