Time and Again

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

Recently, I met a charming young man who had just graduated from college. I asked him what he had been studying and, much to my surprise and delight, he said geography. I imagined that meant he was up on the two capitals of Bolivia and the three capitals of South Africa. But it turned out he was a cartographer, an actual map maker like Mercator. This would be the same Mercator whose famous projection is responsible for inflating the size of Greenland thereby stimulating the lust and greed of the American president. I told him I’d majored in European history which used to be a subject. There was a conversational lull of thirty seconds after which I asked him what he had studied in college. He gave me that bewildered look the young take on when confronted with the brain fog of the old. I realized I was guilty of the cardinal sin of repetition which, despite my best efforts, sometimes pops up like a politically incorrect remark.

Photo by yang wewe on Unsplash

Large tracts in my brain seem to have emptied out, once thriving neighborhoods now ghost towns. But what particularly interests me in the anecdote of the map maker is that sometimes the emptiness attracts whatever’s near at hand. So if there’s a silence that needs to be filled why not just toss in the nearest available question whether or not you’ve just asked it? That way you don’t have to work so hard to think of something else to say. These repetitions seem to be out of my control. They just appear, eager to volunteer for the cause, happy to fill in whatever blanks might arise. This makes me wonder about the more worrying possibility that I’m repeating myself in my writing. I’ve been posting these short essays for more than a decade with a break of two years when I was collecting them into my book, Twilight Time. Now that night is truly falling and the remaining twilight rapidly fading, I find myself wondering if I’m repeating myself in print. How deep is my bench of memories? How many unique stories can I unearth before I topple into the hole? There’s no knowing and, of course, not knowing is the main event, the overarching subject.

I wanted to tell you - bear with me - about the moment in 1992 when I thought life was as good as it was going to get. It was a hippie wedding at the bird sanctuary in Lenox, Mass. Everyone I knew in the Berkshires was there, each one more smashed than the next. Frank and I were sitting at a table with our best friends and even my son, just returned from his junior year abroad in Japan, was with us. We were all laughing. Who knows what was so funny. That’s not the point. The point was the collective hilarity. I was forty-seven years old and felt full of life. I wanted for nothing. Then Jimmy told Pat that he had a terrific headache and had to get away from the loud music and all the commotion. Pat was pissed. It was just like Jimmy to crash and burn like that. She told him he could leave. She’d get a ride back to Great Barrington with someone else. It was a glioblastoma, Jimmy’s headache, and the opening act of the pageant of mortality that was about to unfold for all of us. But just for that moment at the bird sanctuary, we were innocent of loss and its endless iterations. Loss does not worry about repeating itself.

At first, the change in the social chemistry appeared to be gradual but in reality it’s quite abrupt and irreversible. There is a re-alignment in the collective consciousness. It’s like a game of pick-up sticks. Now that we’re playing in earnest, each stick carefully withdrawn from the pile results in further instability. Which stick will be removed next? Which will remain at the end? None. None will remain. Am I repeating myself? I’m asking the same questions over and over again because these are the questions that preoccupy me.

The young graduate wants to make maps, nail down the railroad tracks in relation to the river, establish true north. But there are no maps of the terra incognita, the undocumented territory we are all heading into and much as we try, we can’t hold on to that youthful certainty that the party at the bird sanctuary will be repeated time and again. We’ll just have to keep telling the story.

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