The things you end up thinking about on the cusp of something new

 

Cookie has been deep in thought.  

Deep in thought when he should be packing.  The movers swoop in to start the job of packing our lives up in brown boxes in about 36 hours.  

A snap of the finger in time. But there is something about me that wants to be in this moment. 

Remember when a day and a half felt like an eternity when we were young and had no idea how time worked?  When we are young, the things and places that we pass, and we think we will always be there because they always have been there for us. 

Now it seems like it flies by in an instant. They say by your eighties, time feels like minutes. In your nineties the past flies by in seconds. 

Maybe my age is beginning to show, but there comes a time in your life when saying goodbye to your familiarities, to your surroundings becomes as important, as the people in those surroundings.  People and the space around you become part of you, however small they are.

In writing every book, it's the pictures that people say "I debated whether to bring this or not" or "I know you won't be interested in this," that ends up being the most important image we come across.  So today, it's not a streetside picture of our neighbor's beautiful homes that I will miss, but the view of those houses from the window in my office. Or through my windshield. Or on a walk. 

In my youth, when I went to Park Synagogue Nursey School in Cleveland Heights, the small bus that we rode in would take a route that took us down to Fairhill Road, to pick up a girl who lived at Belgian Village, a set of chic houses built in the cliff overlooking the Doan Brook ravine.  

The ravine was populated with birch trees. None of us had ever seen these white trunk trees, and unable to process where we were or traveled, that place, that seemingly enchanted forest - at least to us - simply became known as "The White Trees".

I captured that in my mind, and it has stayed clear as if it were yesterday. But that yesterday was fifty-eight years ago.  

At the same time, I couldn't tell you the little girls name.  

So how do you capture the knobley trunks of the Sycamore trees that dot parts of Baltimore, when they are wet with rain, and the new bark turns brilliant green and putty brown.  You can take a picture, but pictures never really capture the life of that moment. 

How do you capture the people who stand at this corner or that, along York Road waiting for a break in traffic before they dart into traffic to get to the other side.  What are they thinking? 

How do you capture those incidental things?

And then you start to wonder while running an errand, "In all likelihood, I'll never be here again."  

Which leads you to ponder some very foolish thoughts.  It's not grand considerations like "the last time I saw Paris" but it is the everyday tasks like the last time I go to this Staples, the last time I enjoy the Enchiladas Supreme at El Salto, and the last time I will ever set foot in the Ruxton Post Office. 

When you're young, you're foolish, you don't know it because you have nothing in your experience to give you perspective on what lasts and an explanation on why it matters what matters. The places that have always been will always be.  And what was here before you doesn't matter because well, the world revolves around your experience in that moment.  

It isn't until you look back and think, "Wasn't there a house there?" "Where are all the people I remember walking in this area. The streets look so barren, and the shop windows are empty," that you realize that just as you have gotten on in the world, the world has gotten on without you. 

If we are fools in our youth, then I am surely a foolish old man now. Who is to say that even if I concentrate right now, with all my might, I can freeze this moment in time as it is, looking out this window so in five, ten, twenty years I'll remember it perfectly?

In time we forget the type of details that, at this moment, feel so important. As studies have shown that as we forget, our thought functions kick in and fill in what makes sense to remember. You know that you were at a place, you know there was a building, but you have forgotten that the building is cream color, so your mind makes the building white or tan, and then that becomes ingrained in your memory.  Why? Because we don't like having to think that we forgot the details. 

And perhaps it's this old man's mind that desperately wants to remember these moments because I am so afraid of forgetting what is familiar. 

Still, in these quiet moments, before the chaos of the movers enters this house in a couple days, in the ponderings of this place we called home, there is a gentle calmness that I'll need to get through everything that is about to happen to us.  

And it will happen because we want this newness. 

We won't have time to dwell in a place we no longer live. We will be focused on life as we live it.