nostalgia

I know the feeling

This is, as I’ve said before (ad nauseum, you might say), a time of year tinged with sadness for me.  The endings and goodbyes come one after another, waves lapping onto the shore of my life, eroding anything I have written in the sand.  An extra farewell this year is the fact that Matt’s parents have sold their house in Vermont, the house that Matt grew up in, the house where the family has gathered  for years, the house that is one of Grace and Whit’s very favorite places to visit.  The picture above was taken on their very last morning there, looking out over the field that unfurls gorgeously, its colors undulating with the seasons, in front of the house.

On Sunday night Whit was beside himself, unable to go to sleep because he was crying so hard.  He sat on my lap and wept, face wet with tears, wailing over and over again that he didn’t want Grandma and Grandpa to sell the house in Vermont.  It reminded me of the night a year ago when he dissolved into genuine, heartbroken sobs about the fact that he was no longer a baby.  His humor and little boy bluster sometimes camouflage his intensely sensitive core.  He was not comforted by my reassurances that there were many more fun visits ahead, just in different places.  He just sobbed and sobbed, burrowing into my neck like he did when he was much littler, and cried his heart out.  I know the feeling.

Today I picked the kids up from school because it is the last day of regular pick up.  Grace ran up to me, a friend in tow, frantically asking for a playdate with this girl and one more.  The girl standing next to her is moving out of state at the end of this week, and this was literally the last chance.  I said, as gently as I could, that we could not do it, because Grace had a doctor’s appointment.  Long minutes of negotiation ensued, complete with arms crossing, feet stamping, and voices being raised.  When we walked to the car, Grace was in angry tears and Whit was uncharacteristically quiet, not quite sure what was going on.  In the car I told her that this was the last pick up of the year, that I was disappointed that she was acting this way.  She crumpled even further, cried harder.  Almost immediately I apologized, and told her that was unfair of me to have said; there have been hundreds of wonderful pick ups, I said, and there will be more.  One day is not a big deal, and I ought not freight it too much with being the last. She said she felt worse, even worse, about having marred the last pick up of second grade.  She wept.  I know the feeling.

We got home and curled up on her bed to talk it out, and she turned her bad mood around surprisingly quickly.  But her rapid disintegration at school, the urgency of the request, and the emotion in the outburst all speak to how sensitive she is, too, to this season of endings.  While transitions are hard for everyone, I suppose it’s shameful that it’s taken me this long to realize that my children may struggle especially with them, as I do.  When Grace and Whit evince these qualities, straight from the heart of who I am, I am overcome with both compassion and guilt.  I relate intensely to how they feel, but I also feel enormously responsible for the fact that they have these feelings at all.  I wish I could lift this from their shoulders, this inchoate anxiety about change whose darkness can cloud even the most radiant days.  But I can’t.  I think all I can do is try to remain gentle with them about the complicated, non-rational emotions that swirl in times like these.  To allow their sadness room to breathe while also reminding them of all that is bright.  After all, I know the feeling.

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.