nostalgia

Lightning

One night last week there was a big thunder and lightning storm.  This was after a torrential squall in the morning and a tornado warning in the early evening.  The weather has been swooping dramatically lately; maybe the restlessness in my spirit these days is just another manifestation of the vibrations I sense out there in the universe.  Something feels out of whack right now.

I sat in the window of my bedroom watching the blackness of night crack open, over and over, listening to the rolls of thunder and feeling the house literally shake.  And I thought about another night of thunder and lightning.  I was with my almost-brother, Ethan, on the Vineyard, in the house our families rented together for several summers.  This house (we actually rented a few, in the same general neighborhood) had a separate guest house where the four kids stayed (Hilary, Tyler, Ethan, and me).  Ethan and I were sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of the loft, underneath an enormous skylight.

I love lightning.  One summer on the Cape, when I was a camp counselor, a friend and I ran across the front fields in a torrential storm.  I remember literally dancing with the lightning, which blazed all around us.  What an idiotic and naive thing to do, I realize now.  At the time, it was thrilling: I felt as though I was inside the storm.

But last week my thoughts turned firmly, and completely, to that night on the Vineyard.  I remembered lying in the dark with Ethan, watching the sky burst into brilliant light right above our faces, whispering to each other.  It was Ethan’s birthday, or the end of it, because it was nearing midnight.  What I remember most vividly is feeling sad that his birthday was coming to a close, painfully aware of the last moments of his day ticking away.  Even all those years ago – I think I must have been 10 – I was anxious about endings and about time’s passage.

This realization made me feel something in my chest, a knot of inchoate feeling.  Am I saddened to remember the melancholy that twisted through me even as a young child?  Do I feel reassured, resigned, ready to stop struggling against something that is so clearly an essential and indelible part of who I am?  Or am I frustrated that still, so many years later, I’m experiencing the same sorrow, am twisting through the same spiral, over and over again?

I don’t know.  So I just sat, my ten year old self and my 36 year old self staring through the same eyes in frank wonder as the night sky burst again and again into light outside my window.

thank you

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I thank you god for this most amazing day.

Thank you….

… to the lovely, loving crowds that made my 92 year old grandfather, celebrating his 71st reunion, smile more widely than I’ve ever seen

… to the rain for holding off.  The absence of biblical flooding was unnerving (at the 5th reunion we literally wore trash bags), but in a good, good way.

… to the people who came up to tell me that they read this blog.  I cannot possibly convey how much hearing that means to me.  At all.

… To my friends, who so generously talked to, played pool with, and posed for photographs by (and with) my children.  You are family.

… To the seniors who gave Grace, Thacher, Cade, and Ava a hundred or more high fives as they walked in front of us, leading our class, wearing costumes, holding signs, and demonstrating true spirit and pride.

I’m praying my favorite – and only – prayer tonight (and Meister Eckhart’s):

thank you

From the first

From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Princeton takes reunions very seriously.  Very.  This weekend is my 15th.  This will be Matt’s 3rd reunion and for the first time, we are bringing the kids.  The centerpiece of reunions is the parade on Saturday – the P Rade.  All of the alumni classes put on costumes and parade through campus, while the rest of the gathered alumni stand by the sides of the road and cheer.  You heard me right.  At his first reunion, my 5th, Matt turned to me incredulously and asked if he had unwittingly married into a cult.  Why yes, honey, you did!  I smiled and answered, and then promptly returned my attention to my friends and the orange-clad groups of alumni, ranging in age from 100+ to 22, parading past me.

The P Rade always makes me cry.  It has something in common with why the World War 2 veterans walking in the Fourth of July parade in Marion make me cry.  The first class to march in the P Rade is the 25th reunion, and after them comes the Old Guard, is the oldest returning alumni (of which my grandfather is now a proud member).  These men are elderly, some of them walking, some riding in golf carts.  There are always some widows in this group, who come back in their husband’s honor.  The embodiment of how much a place can mean to a person brings tears to my eyes, as does the visible evidence of time’s relentless forward turning.  For these men, I’m certain, it feels like mere moments ago they were the graduating class, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, singing bawdily, rowdily into the spring air, more in touch with their futures and their promise than they ever would be again.

I know, because that was just me.  Mere moments ago, I swear.  And now I’m in the thick of the pack, among the strollers and toddlers and grade schoolers.  This year I’ll have my own children walking beside me, holding my hands.  Both Whit’s godmother and one of Grace’s will be walking with us; simply writing that makes me cry.  How to capture or express the feeling when the past, the present, and the future are all animate in a single moment, in a place that was – and still is – home to me as nowhere else ever has been?  I can’t even begin to do that.  I’m emotional about and nostalgic for a moment I have not even lived yet.

The P Rade is tradition exemplified.  Our fierce commitment to it speaks, I think, of the deep human need to feel a part of something.  It is authentic, the love that swells through the crowd on watching the Old Guard and the young graduates and everybody in between.  There are always many tear-soaked cheeks, and even the most sophisticated or cynical of my friends give themselves over to the rolling pride and belonging and nostalgia that is tangible in the air during the P Rade.

I’m reminded, as I think about this weekend, of how I too loved Princeton from the first time I set foot on its campus.  I visited with my father, Labor Day weekend of 1991, and within an hour of our wandering around I knew I wanted to go there.  Somehow I half-grasped the significance the place would have for me and in an instant made a decision that would alter the course of my life forever (to withdraw my early application elsewhere and to pursue the magnolia-strewn road I’d precipitously, and firmly, decided I wanted).  For someone who makes most decisions cautiously, who is only now learning to trust the voice of her soul, this kind of instinctive, impulsive change of course was distinctly out of character.  And how extraordinarily thankful I am about that to this day.

Feast of losses

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

Song and memory

This weekend was glorious: finally, full sunshine, open windows letting in soft spring air, children biking and running until they were exhausted, and dinner at a restaurant so nearby that Matt and I could walk there through the dusky spring evening.

Saturday I spent five hours in the car scanning unfamiliar radio stations.  I’ve written before about the power that songs have in triggering memory for me; for hours, it was like spinning an old-fashioned rolodex and seeing what was written on the card that it fell open to.  In many cases the words to songs rose up out of some deep reservoir of memory: the words seemed to be carved indelibly on some scroll hidden deep in my consciousness.  I had no idea I knew the words to a song, often, until I was singing along to it.

I’ve realized that my years at camp are full of musical memories.  I wrote about how Like a Prayer will always remind me of being 16 years old and dancing down the dusty dirt aisles of the camp theater, the sheer joy of movement overtaking me.  That song will always, every single time I hear it, remind me of a special, influential friendship and of the fact that I used to love to dance.  One camp tradition that I loved was that each Sunday one unit would perform a song that they’d practiced all week.  These were themed and though I can’t be sure I’m remembering right, I think there were also poems and quotations read aloud.  One year my bunkmates and I sang Landslide, and yesterday, The Logical Song by Supertramp came on and I remembered that that was one too.  Then the Go-Gos came on, and I remembered my Assistant Counselor year, when my 11 peers and I got up during one camp assembly and sang Our Lips Are Sealed.

I just cannot wait for Grace to experience camp, and I hope that the place is as important to her as it was to me, magical and grounding at the same time.

The Soup Dragons came on, singing I’m Free, and I thought about another time when dancing was important to me.  Senior year at Exeter I participated in the dance concert instead of doing a sport.  My dear friend C, a rare real, substantive friend in those years, and I did it together.  We choreographed several pieces, one of which was to I’m Free. In the annals of embarassing photographs, here’s one from another piece (for I’m Free we wore cut-offs and tie-dyed shirts, and I do not have a picture of it).

And then a couple of songs sent me back to college, specifically to my little quad in the sky.  The Freshman, by Verve Pipe, Lightning Crashes, by Live, and Whenever I Call You Friend, by Kenny Loggins, each carried specific and visceral memories.  Whenever I Call You Friend, in particular, reminds me of when I had a broken leg and my wonderful roommates took it upon themselves to dance and sing to entertain me.  In the photograph below they are serenading me, and I remember leaning over to grab my camera, and taking the picture, remember how I was laughing so hard that I could barely hold the camera straight.

And then REM’s Night Swimming brought me back to a spring evening, not altogether unlike this one in Boston, when I walked from my freshman dorm to meet a boy for a first date.  The air was thick with the smell of magnolias, the sky perfect, hydrangea blue; we were in the weeks when Princeton is at its most beguiling.  I walked through the junior and senior dorms, gothic facades on either side of me, feeling vaguely intimidated to even be in these spaces that were still foreign to me.  As I approached the room where I was going, the lead-paned windows were all open and REM’s Night Swimming wafted out into the early evening.  I felt anticipation and nerves, was somehow aware, deep in my consciousness, that I was about to step into a relationship that would be one of the most important of my early adulthood and most formative of my life.  I’ve never heard that song since that night without thinking of that walk, and that sense of promise, the tangible presence of the future right in front of me.

And then, as I neared home, poetically, Southern Cross came on.  I’ve always loved CSN(Y), and this song is one of my favorites.  I thought instantly of the summer of 1998, when Matt and I spent 6 weeks in Africa.  We had known each other only a month or two when we planned the trip; I think my parents probably thought I was coming home in a bag.  We climbed Kilimanjaro and on night before the summit ascent it was crystal clear and gorgeous (not so the night we summitted – white-out blizzard conditions).  We could see both the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper in the sky which, our guide told us in his lilting, accented voice, was very rare.  Only possible right near the Equator.  We both looked up, spellbound at the enormous sky above us, at how far we were from everything we knew.  And yet, at that moment, I’m certain we both felt at home.  “For the first time you understand … why you came this way.”  And we did.

What songs trigger important memories for you?