Passing Time

The theme in my life lately is this general feeling that time is moving at such a rapid speed I don't know how to just slow things down enough to relax and enjoy the moment. Weeks seem to fly by and it seems like New Year's was last month but here it is almost May and I'm left wondering what happened to the last 4 months of my life. Monday will mark two years since Drew and I met. And it will also be my mom's 57th birthday, which boggles my mind even more than my imminent 32nd quickly approaching. When, I wonder, did we all get so old??

Over the weekend, I started cleaning out an antique desk I inherited from my paternal grandparents. There's really no room for it in our apartment and beautiful though it is, it doesn't really fit our design aesthetic and I doubt it ever will. I hate to sell it, but without a place to store it, I'm not really sure what my alternative is. Anyway, I was cleaning it out over the weekend, getting it ready for a potential sale, when I found a little secret drawer full of old cards and letters my grandparents had saved from years ago. Most of them were Father's Day cards I'd sent my grandfather back in the early 80's when I was still a wee child with buck-teeth and well-worn ballet slippers. Some of the letters were from my parents and covered family updates from about the time I was six, right before the birth of my sister, until I turned 12 or so. Reading them was really like finding some buried treasure, but more interesting that re-discovering what my life was like 25 years ago, was imagining my mother writing those letters, the age I am now, all of 31 years old, married and living in Japan, with one kid already and another on the way. What different paths we've taken, what a different life she's lived from her own mother who never left the midwest. And yet, there it is, I can read it in between the lines of those old letters: the similarity between us, the desire for adventure, the excitement in living a life so different from our childhoods.

Included in the bundle of letters was my grandparents' wedding photo. I'd seen it before, but it'd been years and years. I'd forgotten how strong the resemblance is/was between my father and his father, how my sister takes after them in a way that's maybe not obvious at first glance. I'd forgotten the similarities between my grandmother and me, how our eyes are nearly identical, how we have the same round face. I thought of them last night when Drew and I watched A Streetcar Named Desire at the MoMA. I wondered if they watched it in the theater when it first came out. I wondered if my grandmother ever wore hats like the  women in the movie, like Vivien Leigh. I wondered if I'll have grandkids someday who'll wonder about me. I wondered when I'll stop being a thought in someone's mind.

Passover ended over the weekend and Drew went to temple to say a prayer for his mother who passed away when he was young. I like that tradition in Judaism of remembering lost loved ones, I like the idea of keeping people alive in our thoughts and stories. It doesn't make time seem any less fast-moving, but it helps to think I can write the stories down, make them last forever, even when the people in them are long gone.

Comments

[julia]

Just one word: Beautiful

[TQL]

Beautiful indeed.

One thought before you sell it, have you thought about temporarily giving it to a friend until you have more room for it in your life. My dear friend did that with a rocking chair she inherited. She "gave" it to me before she moved overseas b/c she didn't want to store it and didn't trust shipping it. So here, 7 years later, I'm still holding on to it for safe keeping, when she's ready for it again.

[ChicagoJen]

I agree with Julia. Very beautiful post. And I think it's very interesting to examine our parents and past that way. I wish I had letters of my mom to know more!

[angie]

think this too -

if you can find a place to keep it, store it, etc, remember to put the letters/photos back in it when you get it back, and add your own to it. if you can keep it, make a part of specifically for the memories you found in it. a treasure for someone else to find...

[Dawn]

When I was 16 my aunt sent me a collection of letters my mom had written to her when my parents were first married. It was great to read about their lives as a young married couple, getting set up together, having me, shopping for bargain dresses at Filene's...
I read your beautiful post right after I had just finished the finale of 6 Feet Under, the montage as Claire drives to NYC(I'll stop from spoiling it there) but suffice to say it was almost more than I could watch. I love to imagine and reconstruct the past, I'm far less comfortable trying to imagine the future....

[Natalee]

Beautiful post and a wonderful thought.