I was walking home from the grocery store a couple of nights ago with a friend. It was calm and warm and beautiful. We had mushroom garlic pizza. In that walk I began to share with my friend bits of my own life narrative. I began with a remark as to how I am very secretive about my past. I often prefer to keep it quiet. It’s a part of my presence, in a sense, to keep much of my history hushed up.
If we look at it in one way, we are who we are now and the past doesn’t really exist. It is a collection of dream like images that remain in our mind at times, but really have no more substance. When I am really spaced out (i.e. in deep thought), I remember life moments and they are not linear, but float around as if in space. I may remember my first day of high school and suddenly jump back farther in time to grade four and when I used to hang around with my friend Jamie, and was in Mrs. Nason’s class. The first day of high school was fifteen years ago, my friendship with Jamie was twenty years ago. Mrs. Nason died of cancer in nineteen ninety three, and Jamie was killed in a freak car accident in two thousand and six. I remember having conversations with these two individuals. For a moment in life we shared the same classroom. I remember when I was in grade six (just before she died), I was in the school choir and we went to play at the school district music festival. I remember that night clearly. Mrs. Nason was in the audience. I remember looking at her and smiling, she smiled back. She looked so weak, yet so peaceful. We went up on the stage and sang. That was the last time I saw her, because she died not long after.
Later on in grade six, our class went to the museum on a field trip. This was only a few months after Mrs. Nason died. I remember we were in a room, in front of a table with newspaper on it. I remember that we were making paper mache. I remember one of the pieces of paper had her obituary. I read it, and I remember being quite stirred by it. It was unnerving. I remember feeling how weird it was that of all the papers I could find, and of all the pages I could discover and all the obituaries I could uncover, it would be this one...
I often remember such individuals in my life. It is true that even the simplest or transient interaction we may have with another have the potential to present complexities that are so vast that we could explore them for hours and not really grasp it all.
One evening a few weeks ago I was at the Rooms art gallery in St. John’s, NL. The Rooms is built on the top of a hill. It is a tall structure with windows that allow you to look out from the top floor and get a truly panoramic vision of the city. On that evening, I went to the lookout area where there was also a knitting circle meeting. They were chatting away. I approached the lookout window that overlooks downtown St John’s, and the whole downtown area just suddenly morphed into a single unit. The streets I walk, the landmarks I remember and the houses and everything became dense and compact. Even as I looked downtown and saw places I visit on a daily basis, it all had a quality of being out there in a way that was distant and unfamiliar. I was at a vantage point out and above it all. I saw the wholeness of much of my life and I felt disconnected from it. In my viewpoint was my house, friends houses, coffee shops, churches and banks I visit daily. In that moment, I came to appreciate the truly disjointed and at times spacey nature of experience and memories. We may be living moments. We may be sharing experiences with others, and suddenly we may be at a place outside and above it all when even the familiar can become, if only for a few minutes, a long past dream like memory.
Aug 29, 2011
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