“Changing, it rests”

Here come the last days of August! Before anyone feels entirely ready, a smattering of dead leaves starts to collect on the sidewalk. We look out the window at 7PM or 7:30 PM and think, “It’s darker. It’s getting darker already.”

Since starting this blog about my grandmother’s family I’ve meditated more than usual about how time passes. This is the season though – that transition between Summer and Fall – that everyone feels it. “Where does the time go?”

Strangely enough, that feeling was expressed on the very first page of a book I began reading last week. The narrator records himself saying his location and date into a tape recorder. He reflects that even has he does this, his action has become part of the past.

“I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

A little daunting isn’t it? At every moment, we’re writing our personal histories.

Before I started college, I met with a cousin of mine who recommended that I keep a journal during my time there. “You’ll have so many big thoughts”, he told me, “and if you don’t write them down, they’ll be lost.” 

For years I filled up journals with my ideas. I never read the old ones – I just kept writing. Eventually we bought a house and relegated them to a big cardboard box in the basement. Some time after my first daughter was born and I felt time slowing down a little, I decided to excavate.

I wanted to read my old journals. I couldn’t wait to see what my younger, more ‘alive’ self had to say about the world!

Well.

Talk about depressing. Far from “big thoughts” I had written about studying, parties, boys and calories; I sounded insecure, anxious and stupid. So stupid! I sat there with the journals strewn about me, dumbstruck.

I thought I had recorded something meaningful. Instead it was a ten year history of egotism: reality-TV-level navel-gazing. My 30-year old self was not impressed by my 18-year old self. But was that really fair of Older Self?

Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that that flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was…I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones…plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Whereas talk of ‘nothing staying the same’ and ‘constant movement’ exhausts me (sorry Heraclitus), this idea of adding on, of continual building really appeals to me. If I am cumulative, then it’s natural that something I wrote as a teenager wouldn’t sound very wise.

No need for shame.

What’s more, if we are cumulative, then it makes sense that we’re drawn to exploring our grandparents’ history. The effort of trying to identify who these people were and how they interacted with the world need not be a pointless exercise.

Al contrario. Au contraire. (However your relatives might have expressed it!)

It can be a way of connecting yourself to a world that feels increasingly virtual. I may feel like I’m drifting without purpose. Yet generations of people worked with a furious purpose to put me here. Why not use our roots to feel grounded? Isn’t that what roots are for?

(Speaking of roots, is that a wysteria wrapping itself around the house’s entrance? Just curious.)

How’s that for a picket fence? What do you think the white thing is there beside the ladies? Do you keep a journal – is it worth starting again? 🙂