Five Oh

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.