Transported in Time

Do we remain ourselves as the years, like waves, lap up on the shore or do we become different people over the course of a decade, half a century, a century?

A couple of recent family get-togethers have pulled me back in time, and as a result, on most days this spring I’m surrounded by memories — some of which are not even my own.

It’s true that I was just about a complete stranger to organized religion when I married Rob, a man who – at the time– was well on his way to becoming an ordained priest.   It’s also true, however, that at the tender age of five I played a small but significant part in a ceremony held at a picturesque white chapel, (Episcopal, wouldn’t you know?) on Long Island.  In fact, I was probably the very first one to walk all the way down the aisle up to the front, because I was the flower girl at my cousin’s wedding.

Two separate events have brought this memory (although I’m not sure I really can remember it) back to me.  Wanting to make a collage to present to my brother on the occasion of his surprise birthday party a month or so ago, I found a picture of his 10 year old self  standing protectively – he often did this in those days –over me at the wedding reception.  Everyone who saw it said I looked exactly  like my daughter, who is now herself well past flower girl age.  And, by coincidence, I just visited that same cousin, about to have her 50^th  anniversary.  She brought out her wedding album, which includes a different picture of me on that day: the flower girl standing in front of the bride and the maid of honor, another cousin.

Suddenly, looking at these two pictures I hadn’t seen in years, I could almost feel the barrettes in my hair, my knobby knees and the feeling of all of those high-heeled women tossing their heads back with confidence.    If I try hard, I can also remember the whoops that went up outside the church, after the ceremony, when my brother threw a fish – collected from a nearby pond – into the “Just Married” car.   He is still proud of that feat.

The main reason I went to see my cousin, really, was to visit her father – my Uncle Harold.  He is just shy of reaching his 100^th birthday.  A truly remarkable person in many ways, he played three sports all through his Amherst College years while also developing a lifelong passion for Emily Dickinson’s poetry, which he has always recited with a Brooklyn accent.   He might have become a professional football player, I learned just last week, but instead became a lawyer, as did my own father at about the same time.  He married my father’s sister and they were completely devoted to one another throughout their long marriage.  For many years, when nieces and nephews would go to visit them in their home, we would be treated to a wide array of wonderful and hilarious stories from the old days

His days are quiet now, naturally, but I had the real sense while visiting him that his mind is full to the brim with memories.  Once, when he looked particularly deep in thought, I asked if he could put words to whatever it was he might be remembering, and he said, “It’s all a beautiful blur.”  Perhaps he was re-living the magical day when his elementary school teacher brought the whole class to Ebbets Field for fungo hitting. On the wall in his room now, there hangs a picture of him in the prime of his college football playing years side by side with a recent picture of his great-grandson, full equipment on, just starting out in the game.  Are they not both equally real, even separated as they are by more than half a century?

The Emily Dickinson poems haven’t changed one bit, and he can still draw upon those lines for sustenance.   He embarked upon “Because I could not stop for Death…” when I was there.

I came away from the couple of days knowing I wanted to dive back into my current churning time of mid-life, when everything seems to be happening at once, with some kind of expanded vision.  If I have made it all the way from flower girl to wife and mother and teacher, then maybe I’ll also have the good fortune to keep pushing on towards the mysterious land of older age, a land where memories become key companions.

In the meantime, it’s funny how the cousin who seemed almost inaccessibly more advanced back when she was a radiant bride and I was her little flower girl has now become my slightly older friend, focused these days on the well-being of her father on the one end of life, and her grandchildren on the other.    As her husband will attest, we had an awful lot to catch up on.  And, whether or not some of my grandmother’s china makes its way up from her house to mine, I am definitely the richer for the visit.