Decades.
I have found a way to review my life in a way that doesn’t all run together and overwhelm me. The whole thing is a blur of bittersweet memories until I break it down into decades. I can’t find the exact quote that the present seems to stay the same, but when you look back, everything has changed.
My earliest memories are of first grade in Russellville, Arkansas around 1954. When I focus on that time, I can remember quite clearly my house, my school, my pets, my special friends. I remember a fire escape on the two-story school building. You held onto a bar and slid down a metal tube and the big boys were there to catch you at the bottom. One day a girl wore her sister’s blue tulle prom dress as a costume and we were all dazzled. I wonder if I knew about Cinderella? I remember singing in Brownies, “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.”
I started second grade in Edmond, Oklahoma in another chapter of my life.
The sixties brought middle school, a beloved church group, my father’s death and another new chapter. By the end of that decade, I had graduated high school and suffered my first heartbreak.
As I sit here this morning by a sunny window with a hot cup of coffee and my little dog in my lap, I thumb through the decades of my life and see the threads that weren’t always visible at the time. I am avoiding the nightmare news today. A new decade is beginning and the promises of change are everywhere. I am happy and grateful for the past. I look forward to the future ... dinner with friends, seeing the new version of “Little Women”, the changing lives of my children and grandchildren. (The next election, pray God.)
I am old now and at peace with my passing even though I do fear the actual event of my death. My only real regret is not to be able to know the future. The future of mankind, space travel, the lives of my grandchildren and my unborn great-grandchildren. I regret I didn’t go to Europe when I had the chance. Oh, and I deeply regret the times I was cruel and thoughtless. In the middle of the night I remember those times and say I am sorry but it is too late.
I like to imagine a vacation - a time vacation. I would go back almost 100 years to my mother’s childhood in the mountains of North Carolina and my father’s on a farm in Oklahoma. I would visit my favorite moments growing up and go to the Sonic for lunch in high school in my ratty 57 chevy with my friends and the car radio playing “Tracks of My Tears” for some reason. I would relive each precious kiss and the wonderful feeling of being in love even when it didn’t last. I would hold and rock my babies and grand babies. I would relive most of my Christmas Eve’s and cook Thanksgiving dinner with my mom. I would drive around with my grandkids in the car listening to our favorite CD’s. I would hug my husband again. Then I would like to look ahead 100 years and see how we all turned out. Would we still be alive? Would we have found peace at last? I like to think so. And that, as Forrest Gump once said, “is all I have to say about that.” 🙂 Peace out.
