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Thursday, December 03, 2009
closer
As a child, looking at an album of photos of my parents, I felt so removed from these wise older people -- by age, by time, by the grainy grayscale of the photos that made it hard to believe that objects came in colors in the long-ago time before I was born, by the simple knowledge that they were grown up, and that being grown up was a very, very distant thing.
As a teen, I felt removed from them by fashion and by anger. How can these people ever understand me? Look how different their lives were from mine! They have no idea what it's like to live now or to be me! They were young so long ago!
As a young adult, though, things began to change. There's the child that would become my father, with a dirty face remarkably like the one you'll see a few dozen pages and twenty years later -- in the section of pictures from my own infancy. Those are my parents, not even twenty, vowing before God to stay together for the rest of their lives. That's my mother, with my brother in her arms at nineteen years of age. Why, she's not old at all! How did I ever think she was old? She's my age! She's so much like me, holding my own son at the age of twenty-one! She must have felt... just like I do.
And now the past and the future are telescoping closer and closer together, years collapsing in on each other like the pages of a book. Fifteen years ago -- a breath, a lifetime -- I was nineteen, married, calling my mother to ask how to make gravy that didn't turn out as paste. Fifteen years before that, I was four and my mother was in her youthful mid-twenties, an age so far from my own that I thought surely I could never really reach it, not for reals. Fifteen years before that, my mother was a child herself, the age of my younger daughter, keeping a list in her beautiful schoolgirl penmanship of all the horses who lived along her route to school, their locations and their colors and their names if she knew them. I saw that yellowed, penciled list once, and my heart felt squeezed at the thought of that little girl, so like me, so like my own daughter. Then I looked up and saw her standing in front of me, a grandmother six times over. The same girl, no longer removed. Someday soon: me.
Now I look through that same album, looking for a photo of my parents together for a project that someone else is doing. I look at my father and mother, engaged to be married, eighteen years old. I see my brother's eyes looking back at me from Dad's face; I see my daughter's cheeks on his young bride-to-be. I realize with a visceral shock that of all the people in our family, the person closest in age to those young people in that photo is my own son. The infant, the squeaky-voiced round-cheeked boy grown suddenly tall and sonorous, now a carbon copy of the grandfather in the album who left home at sixteen to fight in a war, all long lean legs and unruly hair. Five years from now, he'll be a man. Five years, a breath, a nothing.
Comments
Wow....excellent writing. Beautiful!
Posted by: Anonymous at December 3, 2009 11:49 AM
This is just beautiful, Rachel. Absolutely beautiful.
Posted by: mary at December 3, 2009 11:55 AM
I agree, it's beautiful, and definitely worth caving in for.
Posted by: Michael ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.1970dodgecharger500.com/oldsite/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 3, 2009 11:56 AM
Oh, this gave me the shivers. It's gorgeous.
Posted by: Beck at December 3, 2009 12:46 PM
That is something that has been on my mind recently. Alot..The fact that I have such a small amount of time left with my kids left that I should be cherishing these moments. I knew these years would go fast, but not this fast. I remember the first time I met your parents. They seemed kinda old. They were what, not too much older than I am now. =) Funny how that happens.
I am hoping you will be writing more in your blog, I have missed reading it. love you! ((hugs))
Posted by: debi at December 3, 2009 01:22 PM
Love it, and can so relate!
Posted by: beth @ brew*crew at December 4, 2009 06:43 AM
Okay, THAT made me cry. You and Beck ARE GOING TO KILL ME.
Posted by: Kat with a K at December 4, 2009 11:25 AM
What delightful writing. Thank you.
Posted by: Karen at December 12, 2009 01:43 PM
Glad you're back writing. This is lovely.
And - here's hoping your son's life never is at risk in a war as his great-grandfather's was, but if it has to be, it is one in which he can believe to the bottom of his soul is worth fighting. But I do hope even more that his adulthood is one in which the world is at honorable peace. (No, I don't expect it either, but I will always go on hoping.)
Posted by: dichroic at December 29, 2009 04:58 AM
P.S. Just reread Sense and Sensibility, and was a bit discombobulated to realize I am older now than Mrs. Dashwood. Elinor and Marianne's *mother*. For that matter, I'm probably older than Marmee March at the beginning of Little Women, Mrs. Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, and quite possibly Marilla in AoGG. Yeesh.
Posted by: dichroic at December 29, 2009 05:01 AM
