Looking Back

This was a summer of reunions for me. The family reunion was my first in years, and it was perfectly pleasant. I enjoyed catching up with cousins with whom I hadn’t spoken in years, and it was fun introducing my children to relatives who already loved them for no other reason than that they share the same blood. Sadder, however, was witnessing the real and marked decline of my older aunts and uncles. I remind myself that I should be so fortunate to have younger nieces and nephews looking at me with pity someday for being so old.

I also went to my twentieth high school reunion, which was not surprisingly far more anxiety producing. High school seems secondarily about education and far more about finding a place in the social universe and working through powerful emotions, most notably love and envy and sometimes envy on account of love.

One change all for the better from the ten year reunion is that most folks were far more relaxed and less anxious about impressing their classmates. Most of the guys had more-or-less let themselves go in appearance, while the females were still perfectly presentable. There might be a selection process at work here, with females insecure about their appearances more likely than the males to forgo the reunion altogether.

For me the reunion was like an emotional depth-charge detonated in psychic waters more shallow than I might have guessed. My own sense is that most people’s “emotional memories” are fairly short. Once out of sight and out of one’s life, emotions linked to persons and events naturally begin to fade. Their memories are like afterimages of the sun burned in the eye that fade quickly with time. In contrast to that, as long as I can remember the past has held a kind of tyrannical grip on my mental well-being. I remember at the age of twelve thinking about events that happened at age six with vivid freshness and intensity, and I remember wondering why the “now” has emotional privilege over past events. Surely at some level the past has as much Being or perhaps more so that the present, which is of course radically incomplete. I continue to remember with intense vividness past social blunders I committed as well as occasions I slighted people, whether intentionally or otherwise. My ego has taken a whipping from these memories. These memories, over time, become the equivalent of well-traveled ruts in my mind.

As a result, my impulse at the reunion was confessional, and I had to fight the desire to apologize for words and deeds that I’m almost perfectly certain have been long-ago forgotten by everyone but me.