Hindsight is a grand adventure, in some ways our most wondrous. What to make of our time! What our time made of us!
Live long enough and, if depicting’s your wont, you might feel an urge, even an urgency, toward summation. It’s a fool’s errand, of course, the story of one’s life, since the story ceaselessly evolves with consciousness. Today’s story hardly resembles yesterday’s, for the light has changed – and the weather – and you in regard to both. Memory, like the sea, belches forth, then reclaims, scraps from the wreck.
Even so, the temptation is strong to package one’s experience for any future investigator and, more importantly, for oneself, so one can claim with a quiet conscience, This is how it was. Granted, finality is fatuity, but by packaging a time – and ribboning it – one makes of it an accomplished fact. Plus, it’s fun. The act of recollection, of raking, unearths revelations more startling than stone arrowheads to an excavator’s tines.
My life, in hindsight, has been a miracle, to its occupant at least. I learned to love, see, say, rejoice, revere and pray, what more could one ask? It has also been, as any life is, a fable with a moral. My family’s motto – imagine, I was born with a coat of arms, dredged from old books to emblazon humble origins – was (in Latin, which none of my forbears could read) NIL DESPERANDUM – Never Despair – perfect for my rollercoaster ride through seven decades. More than once, I adjudged myself a goner, shipwreck, write-off, the tattered end of my line. But in Yogi Berra’s immortal formulation, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And in these last decades – since Jane – I hove into a harbor resplendent as Paradise.
I blink incredulous. Is that really my story? Or have I slyly altered the rules of the game to make myself its winner?
For my first half century I felt stuck – being the son, grandson, husband, parent, neighbor, citizen predicted and expected. I was born fortunate – in material terms, extravagantly – but my luck seemed both lack and lock. “From those to whom much has been given, much is to be expected,” my father ceaaselessly intoned. And those expectations were manacles and shackles to the imagination. So much I didn’t dare do because by such a one as I, it wasn’t done.
Tell the truth, for example. One might – if the truth were convenient. But where candor and courtesy collided, one never – never – upset the applecart by confessing truly. Politics, religion, and private concerns were not to be discussed in company, I was taught. Leaving what, exactly, on the conversational menu, I wonder now from afar.
Love too was off-limits – unless convenient, of course – always giving way to duty, responsibility, propriety (my load of expectations assumed various names). One did as one ought – and had been taught – never as one dreamed. Comme il faut or fry in hell. This restriction narrowed choices and diverted me from my true desires.
Most emphatically, passion was prohibited. Nothing in excess. Lust was a troublemaker, not least a lust for life. And God help you if you got in with God. One attended church – it was expected – but pay attention? That Sermon on the Mount was just words, dearie, from ever so long ago.
Like Robinson Crusoe, I survived my shipwreck and began anew, mixing my mush and stitching my garments from the stuff I found. There were no expectations on my empty island, so truth, love, and passion lighted my way. And here you find me, with a full and happy heart.
A miracle, and then some.