Because I can, I often take an afternoon siesta in the upstairs office. The old bed sits by the north facing window which is partially covered by a tattered, old-people style curtain that lets in flutters of filtered sunlight. So it was last week when I plopped down, exhausted with age, and was caught immediately by the blue light that flowed across the ceiling from the reflection off a small above-ground swimming pool that lays just outside. This played first with my sight, then my pleasure, then my memory, transporting me back to those great summer days from childhood and youth. Then this, too, shifted, from pleasant memories to the sting of aching nostalgia, captioned by the thought, “never again.” Those great times – not “great” as in large or magnificent, but in simple joyfulness - were gone for good, along with the people as they were, and others altogether. Two close friends of mine from the old high school and early adult days are now dead, as are my parents; most of my friends and, of course, girlfriends are off on lives of their own which will never match with mine again, at least not like they once had. So is the way we thought and the music we listened to, and even the comic books that spoke once to our vision of the world. All gone forever.
This is how it has always been for me in late August when the summer is dying even as it comes into its greatest green-gold beauty, and even as the gasping heat of mid -summer dissipates. It used to mean the start of a new school year, then later in life the start of football season and new opportunities for recreation and parties. Now it means only what is past. Never did I think of certain epics of the past as all that great as I lived them, or at least any better than any other times past or what was to come. Now I want to bottle them, as that old song by Jim Croce said, and keep them forever so that I might live them again and again.
That day the emotional pain was so great that I actually had to get out of bed and gratefully lose myself in work. And it was then that it hit me, strange as it was: that it is the good times in life that become more painful than the bad, or at least the ordinary bad.
The bad I am talking about are the sins and faux pas of our lives, the mean things we did or the good things we did not do, or the social blunders that we stumbled into that might even be remembered to this day by others. They could be the cross word to the stranger or the cheating on a faithful girlfriend; they could include the time we got drunk and did or said something outrageous or embarrassing, or the stupid teen-age thing we said in a fight with mom or dad. They are more numerous than we could ever believe on a normal day, but seem to come out in an endless array late at night or some other time of alone-ness. They make us squirm. We want them to go away, and if we are religious, they make us pray for forgiveness because no good god could ever get along with a jerk such as ourselves.
Not fun, I admit, but not the same as the pain of a long life of good things. What we wish we did not do or wish we had done are nothing compared to the things we did do that were good fun or were sublime moments of beauty and insight. The ugly are the trash we wish we had never wallowed in; the good and the beautiful are the coins that we carelessly threw away, not out of stupidity but because that is what we do. We take the good for granted and are blown away by the bad, but it is the good that is the more enduring and endearing to us, and what we miss most. Astonishing as it seems to me, what we long for that once was is more painful to us than what we hate and wish would go away.
As we live through this golden time of year, we might keep that in mind: that this will never be again; that the soft breeze of morning over ripe fields, or the first cup of tea as we watch the birds come to the bath outside the window, will never be quite like we see them now. Nor will our children or our wife or husband or our friends be as they are now, ever again. We cannot put them in a bottle but we can appreciate them more as they are. With that, the pain of remembrance might become even stronger, but so will the goodness of now. And I wonder: if these are our most ingrained and lasting memories, might this not be the same in eternity? Might not the good outweigh the bad by seven to one, or even seventy times seven to one? Might not an intelligence that imbues us with such longing and knows what is most dear to our hearts count that most, and our dark transgressions only as fading shadows?
Until after Labor Day, FK
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