Passage
Summer of 1969. Two years before I came along.
I look at old photographs a lot these days, trying to divine who I was, and who I may become. It helps to recall memories that are spun into words, words into paragraphs, paragraphs into passages, and — eventually — passages into a story.
I lingered on this one a long time, though I have no memory of it other than what vestiges of inherited memory we may bring from the DNA of those who made us.
I lingered because I recognized something of myself in that faded old snapshot, something universal to us all.
You never think of your parents as anything but your parents.
You never think of them as young; as kids with dreams and hopes and fears and pain and love and a bright, shining future still stretched out before them, radiant with youth and passion and fire.
You never think of them as just like you, with the same feelings and desires you have.
No. They are simply your parents; your safe harbor, your protectors, your providers.
Until, of course, they are gone, or going fast, and then you realize they are you, have always been you.
That what you feel, they once felt. What you are, they once were.
If you are no longer young, the memory of your youth still burns within you. Mine still does, though I am now long past that time.
And what you were at one point, what you remember so vividly about yourself at that time, so too they remembered about themselves.
Dreams. Their dreams. Before they became who they made themselves into for you. And then you became their dream and their life.
There’s a haunting line from a gorgeous old Mary Chapin Carpenter song that I think about a lot these days.
She sings about a photograph, of parents smiling for the camera in sienna shades of light, and now being older than they were then, that summer night.
That moment of realization happens to us all, of course.
And then one day they are gone, and you become to your kids what your parents were to you; a fading reminder that we were all young once, and we were all once someone other than who we became.