No I don’t want to be 21 again.
But I want to remember what it felt like.
Not because it was perfect, but because the farther away from it I get, the more it fades.
Anna Quindlin once wrote :
I did not live in the moment enough. This is
particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in
photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the
grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1.
And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they
sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.
But I knew this. I
kept a journal and wrote down so much.
But I don’t remember what it was really like. I’ve tried to stop the clock, but you can’t even catch it.
Life is With People
is a study of the culture of the Jewish neighborhoods of Eastern Europe, the Shtetl. The book attempts, not only to describe life in
these communities that no longer exist, but recreate them. They take the reader through the rhythms and sounds of the week, trying to reconstruct daily life.
The Introduction to the book describes its task this way:
Like a dance, for
which the music and the choreography have never been written down, a great part
of any human culture is lost to humanity when the group which has carried it,
devotedly, in every word and gesture dispersed, or destroyed, or forsakes the
traditional way for ways which are new.
It is the same for every culture and community we have been
a part of: The house we grew up in, the fraternity we lived in, the place our kids called home. Every dinner table has similarities and
differences from those before, but none are exactly the same.
We were taught, inculcated, at 800 Lincoln to
learn and live as the Men of the Mu did before us. That house had a smell and a rhythm that
existed while those 50 boys lived there, but when they scattered, it did too. Just like the culture of the cabin at Camp Walden, the hockey team, or Southfield Lathrup senior high school class, or our
house when it was filled with the five of us.
And once they are gone the culture is only in the memory of the
participants. You can’t recapture it. When the kids come home it’s not the same as
when they lived there, or when I go home or the people from those places get
back together at a birthday or a reunion.
New people now live at 20445 Willowick Drive, others walk
through the halls of Markley, the apartments and classrooms look the same, but they are different, because
the personalities are: 6500 days in that childhood bedroom, 200 nights in that dorm
room, 400 mornings in that fraternity house, 15 years when all 3 children lived
under that roof. Those world's cannot be reconstructed.
There is a value in memory.
More certainty there.
The logical steps of growing up, college, work, marriage, kids,
more, have ended.
At 50 there are more choices, but less clarity.
