Remembering

I’ve had a few comments in response to yesterday’s message about anticipation. The invitation to recall childhood memories struck a chord for some. I’ve enjoyed hearing some of your reactions to looking back on special events of childhood. I expect that most of us have vivid memories of some birthday, holiday, or other big occasion when we were young. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that important days would stand out in our memory?

But what of the ordinary days? Can you remember any of them? I can. I don’t remember anything about when, where, or how I got my hula hoop. But if I close my eyes, I am back on the sidewalk of 85th Avenue in the late afternoon sun of a summer day in 1959, twirling my hula hoop in my aqua pleated skort (yikes!). I can smell the trees. I can feel the air. I can hear the rattly sound of the whizzing hoop. It seems as if I can actually relive that moment. And there are so many others. The older I get, the more it seems as though I can teleport back to ordinary days of my childhood. For some reason, summer days are the ones that come to mind first for me.

I’ll bet that it’s the same for you, that there are times when you can recall very ordinary sights, sounds, scents, or experiences from your childhood. That’s a great gift of our memories. They don’t just collect “big stuff.” And sometimes it’s the seemingly unimportant that is closest to the surface. I am grateful for the chance to sort of relive these typical times.

Thornton Wilder touched on this in one of my favorite plays, Our Town. When the newly deceased Emily Gibbs learns that she can go back and relive a day of her life, she is tempted to choose a happy one, the day that she first knew that she loved the man she would marry. But her mother-in-law cautions against it, urging her to “[a]t least choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” Part of the lesson of Our Town is that every day is important. We’ve probably all received that message lately.

There is nothing ordinary about these days, but for many of us there’s a certain predictability to our life even in this extraordinary time. Around the world, seeing clearer skies has become ordinary. In our largest urban areas, hearing birds and seeing wildlife on the streets has become ordinary. For sea creatures of all kinds, a deeper quiet has become ordinary. With her usual insight, Margaret Renkl points out that this time "is allowing us to see with our own eyes how ready the natural world stands to reclaim the planet we have trashed, how eagerly and how swiftly it will rebound if we give it a chance.” She goes on, "while we have both the time to observe and the window perch to watch from, we can use this cultural moment to rethink our relationship to wildness. We can ponder what it truly means to share the planet.” Margaret Renkl Op-Ed

And not only with the natural world, but with our human family, as well.

With our days of sheltering at home rolling into one another, you may find that you even lose track of time; without a familiar schedule, it can be easy to forget what day it is. Ordinary days in an extraordinary time. But these are days — we are having experiences — that we will want to remember, perhaps for many reasons. Each of these days is important. What will you want to remember? Are you making any kind of record to help you do that? Even a mental one? What would it be like for you to spend some time each day reflecting upon the memories that you want to take with you when this is over?

Renkl says that, "our first task when we emerge from this isolation will be to remember. To sear into our memories that pure pageantry of wildness, of life in its most insistent persisting. And then to try in every possible way to save it.” She’s talking about the environment, of course, and responding to climate change. Which surely must be our first priority. But shouldn’t we also try to remember the many kindnesses, the sense that we are truly in this together, and the ways that we have sought greater connection? We know that there is much healing to be done, and that both our planet and our people need care they have not been receiving. Now we have seen both what could be and what needs to change. May we remember when this is over.


                     (Photo credit: Susan Keyser)

Until tomorrow, I wish you good health and deeper connections, and a joyful memory or two to bring a smile.

Love,
Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma

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