Firsts and Lasts

Firsts and Lasts

by Molly Williams

            This is the season of firsts and lasts. Big, ceremonial beginnings and endings.  Weddings and graduations, babies and baptisms and showers and May Crownings; I am awash in them. Wonderful things that we celebrate outdoors in lovely dresses with flowers and gifts and lots of Facebook postings.

            But our lives are filled with hundreds of smaller beginnings and endings. I have a theory that we almost always remember the first time that we do something, but that when the last time that we do that thing rolls around, we hardly ever know when it is. If we knew it was the last, would we be able to do it? Or would we hesitate, paralyzed by the idea of never having this moment back, or that this day or this friend or this song might come to its end?

            We remember and record our child’s first steps, their first words, their first birthday, but what about the thousands of little daily things that happen, each of which may be the last, but we allow to pass unnoticed, because to catch them all would be impossible.  How often does a memory of a friend pop into mind, and I think about how long I had not thought of her; then I wonder about all the ones I have not thought of at all, and I am saddened by a loss I can’t even identify.  To live with that loss burbling beneath the surface would be unbearable; yet to let it go seems criminally cold.

             A few years ago a famous local restaurant forced by development from its longtime location held a “last-night” party for over a month. It was packed more than ever each night, as everyone wanted to be part of its history, even though we all knew it was reopening just a few miles away a few months later. But the ending was the lure – the exclamation point on an experience makes us part of it. 

            With our growing children it is doubly hard, because we are both a part of it and wanting to record it; we are exhausted from and exhilarated by the constancy of forward movement, and need to accelerate and stop it at the same time.

            I wish I knew when was the last time my daughter reached up to be held, when I swept her up in my arms to my hip as I had done countless times before. I would have buried my head in the vanishing baby scent of her, and held her so close her heart once again beat in rhythm with mine, so she would always somehow remember what we used to sound like together. But I didn’t know, so she squirmed and seemed heavy, and I put her down and she ran away, and that was the last time.

            They say time marches on, but that is too loud and joyous a word for what it does. Time is a sneaky silent thief who steals moments away when you should have been paying attention but you’re not, and suddenly all the firsts have become lasts, and you wonder when that happened. The first bright pink backpack has become the ripped up last tattered pile of notebooks she’s really ready to throw away, and the first photo and kiss at the school house door is now the rush out to a last final exam with sometimes a hurried bye at her car as she pulls on the uniform skirt for the last time ever.

            In a few weeks my daughter will don the pearls my mother gave me and I will give her. She will walk down the stage in a lovely white dress and let me put a laurel wreath on her shining head, taking her last bow on the stage of her childhood. With her classmates she will sing her school song in French as her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and cousin did before her. She will carry out these traditions beautifully, although she has already told me she may not stay in our hometown, and she may not send her daughter to the same school. She may be the last of our family there, and that is ok.

            A few weeks after that she will take a last look around her childhood bedroom and not make her bed for the last time.  She will over pack up and head out our door, leaving something important behind like always. We will drive her seven hours away, where she will take her first steps into her new room with a first ever roommate, and we will both cry, because this is one last we saw coming from a million miles away, but it still really really hurts. I won’t know any better how to store this in my heart than the stealthy ones that crept up on me, it’s just that this will have a huge neon flashing ouch dinging me for a long while to come.

            One day next winter I will realize that I didn’t wake up missing her, and that our house no longer echoes her giggly stomping feet, and we actually found fun things to do. That will be my first, a new first, a starting over first; not fresh anymore, but certainly wise and weathered and calm, and ready for whatever.    

            She deserves her firsts too;  her first brave steps into her life all her own, not repeating my eternal 80’s angsty crises. She is a cautious warrior, a listener before a doer, a respecter of tradition and then a breaker of barriers. She will be fearless, once she believes from me there is nothing to fear. First, she will dip a toe, then dive, into the deep end of her bottomless pool, if I clap my hands and urge her to Jump, Baby, Jump!  Last, she looks back deeply, truly and sometimes longingly, but has never doubted her heading.  Her thousand little firsts are yet to come, her regrets not having greeted the dawning rays of the morning star.

            Tomorrow beckons, mommy waves goodbye.  I guess I’m good with that.

Home

      To those of us who can rattle off the phone number of the first home we lived in, (Willow2-1604) the pull of memory can be powerful and bittersweet. It can shape all our future place wishes, and rarely fades with time.

      Childhood homes are more than our first stop on this earth. They are where we learn our names, and also who we are. That we are more than just ourselves; we are first part of our family, then our neighborhood, then the community, and hopefully eventually a larger world.

    My first home was a sturdy ranch in a now aging post-war subdivision. Although it seemed huge and completely familiar to me then, when I drive by it slowly now, it looks like all the other tidy tracts of its era, indistinguishable on its block.

     Since my first house I have lived in two other homes of my parents’, a number of dorm rooms and the sorority house in my college town; six different apartments in Kansas City, and two houses of my own. But nothing has the pull of that first home.

     In the memory box of that house live the thudding of my brothers roughhousing in the hallway, the smell of my mother’s fresh baked bread, and the taste of the strawberries that escaped under the chain length fence of the sweet elderly neighbors to the rear of us. I can hear my dad whistling his way home in the garage, and the dog’s toenails scratching let me in from the backyard. Although I spent less than ten years in that house, they were important ones, and they linger long in who I am.

     My husband and I moved into our current house three months before our daughter was born. (By the way, visibly pregnant is a great time to move – no one expects you to do anything remotely strenuous.) Although the current plan is to plant the for sale sign as the U-Haul pulls away for college, by then she will have spent her entire childhood in this house.

     Before I am ready, she will leave this room she made hers at three days old. Its walls have made the paint progression from baby girl pink through tween green to young lady lavender. Here is the hallway where she took her first steps, the bedroom door she slammed with all her thirteen-year-old fury, and the kitchen counters she no longer needs a stool to reach when we make Christmas cookies.

     Outside is the rainy sidewalk where she broke her arm on a treacherous two-wheeler since corralled in the shed. The trees she climbed, the playhouse now overgrown with weeds, the block she took long thoughtful walks around. And here the front porch light, under which she may eventually kiss a boy.

     Wherever we are, she will always have a home, of course. I know my independent girl will make her own lovely world around her. But I am glad we will have given her what my parents gave me. Wherever she lives, she will take with her the memory of home, to be opened over and over again like a gift which never fails to surprise and cheer. Ribbons of memory will wrap her with us, sometimes triggered by nothing more than a never to be forgotten phone number.

Anticipation

    A recent NPR story about the benefits of experiences over acquisitions trumpeted an obvious fact that addicted travelers have always understood: being and doing is better than getting and having.  It’s the experiences, immersions, contacts and memories that make us rich, not the tangible accumulations. 

  Interestingly, according to the study, a generous portion of our enjoyment of an activity is credited to the anticipation of it; looking forward to something is apparently half the fun.  I know this, which is why in my Mid-West house there is a hard rule – we can’t talk about Mexico until October. 

   October is many things to us – the excitement of the new school year has become routine, but not yet drudgery; fall crisps our mornings and wilts my begonias; sweaters come out and shorts get stored; and the seasonal charter flights to Puerto Vallarta go on sale. These things collide, making our annual March retreat seem just tantalizingly at the tips of our reach, as though if I listen hard I can hear the surf crash under our balcony. And if I put my hand out just so under the palapa I can taste the salt on my tequila.  

   The wishing is tough, and although the looking ahead is sweet, we can only stand it so long, which is why there exists the Rule of October.  To harbor such desire all year long would do a disservice to my lush June flower planting fever, to the languid August afternoons floating on the hot lake, to cicada drowned evenings on the deck, when the fading September sun slants through the tall canna and crows pepper the sky.  It seems to diminish the luxurious joy I have in my daily life if I immediately start wanting to be somewhere other than my lovely home as soon as I return to it. 

   But the need to wish ourselves there is strong, and helps to resign us to the mornings to come, when I will certainly have to shovel before dawn to make carpool.  This glorious autumn will give way to dark breakfasts and bare tree limbs, and then I will ache for the smell of bougainvillea and the trill of the muffin man on the sidewalk. By January, when the light gets so weak that noon barely makes a shadow on the snow angels frozen crunchy in the yard, we will talk ourselves giddy at the dinner table, planning dinners out on new courtyards and Madonna-bus excursions to foreign neighborhoods.

     October is when we can begin again to relish the certainty that our friends will find us on the beach and the mariachi will wake us from siesta.  The fullness of daily life nudges over a bit to make room for the frizzle of anticipation from knowing that Puerto Vallarta is there waiting, welcoming, warm, and familiar.  I can do November, February, all the mean months between now and March.  Because now is October, and now I can dream.

 

There Oughta Be a Word . . .

     The English language is a beautiful and frightening thing. A few years ago the people who worry about this sort of fact noted that we now have passed the 1 million word mark. Words we understand are a smaller subset of that; if English is your first language, you probably comprehend anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 words. What we USE, however, is an even smaller subset of those, around 10%.

      My articulate and educated husband, who also happens to have a penchant for letting you know when a word isn't used exactly properly, may have an active vocabulary of around 20,000 words, which is a lot. Children learning to speak their native language double their word bank every few months, a pace we can't possibly match as adults. The more education you have, generally the greater your range, although the most verbally poetic and expressive man I know has no formal education beyond high school - a lifetime of reading has given him word wings. Words - beautiful, specific, descriptive, long, short, pithy, and vague - are everywhere. And yet sometimes they fail me utterly.

     Why is there no word for the tangle of sensations when the first fall leaves skitter across the sidewalk, and the not-as-early sunlight slants into the still vibrant begonias, while the scent of cool nights lingers on my damp newspaper?

   Or the feeling when, while lingering over coffee after dinner out, when the perfect equilibrium between temperature and sweetness has finally been achieved, the solicitous waiter tops me off, and, although happy for the more, I rue that I will now have to start again?

    Maybe someone else knows the word for the heart pounding anxiety, tinged with pride in her and wistfulness for the safety of her cradle, that comes each time I take my teen out to practice her new driving skills.

     The ruthless sneakiness of memory is a minefield of lexical pitfalls. When I am uneasy that there is something I have forgotten, but even the shadow of what it might be lies in the unplumbed corner of my mind, there are no ways to express the almost anxiety. I need a word to sum up the rush of associations and memories that a single scent can summon, and then to describe how it is just as quickly gone, and left me with no ability to describe the whiff.  Why, for that matter, is it so hard to describe a smell? We have to associate it WITH something else; as though there are no intrinsic aromas, simply those like or contrary to others. 

     This disappointment in the language is brought on, I think, by the elegance of this season change. I am almost ready to relinquish air-conditioning, sanguine about pulling out the sweaters and leggings, anticipating my peasant cooking style of cold weather months, but still nostalgic for the wavy heat of Mid-West summer. Like so many things, the passage to fall is both so gradual as to be almost unnoticed, and yet also instant; imprisoning it in expression is like putting lightning in a jar.

     And if anyone can find the word to capture the feeling of time both firebolting past me and holding me wrapped in a perfect interval, where past present and future are all in this day, then teach it to me. Until then, I will bumble through the unutterable beauty of these moments, committing to sly memory the nuances and sharp corners, holding tight to all that is just out of my reach. 

     

The Things We Collect

         In the lobby of the public library in my neighborhood, there is a yard square glass-topped display case with the intriguing sign “Things People Collect.” It draws me every time I am there, to peek into the curious favorites of other people’s keepiness. I have dawdled over marbles in every color and pattern, vintage ceramic flower planters shaped like lambs and ponies, and a dizzying array of Pez dispensers.

       I once installed my own collection there for a smug month; miniatures from dozens of places I have visited around the world, such as a pinkie sized Eiffel Tower and Plymouth Rock as a pebble. I like my miniatures because they are, of course, small, and they remind me warmly of neat places and things we did there. Noble purposes for a collection. 

   Why we keep what we keep is a mystery. I mean collecting, not its more insistent and unwelcome cousin, hoarding, which by now has its own entry in the DSM5, and differs in many respects, including that collecting is usually by choice, not compulsion.  Not all collecting is by choice, of course. Once you admit to liking a particular category of things, mere affinity can swiftly be transformed into collecting by well-meaning friends who are relieved to have a ready gift idea. That is how my mother started her girlhood collection of kitschy salt and pepper sets, although she soon realized she liked the idea of them more than the reality. Reversing that perception took her years of disappointed birthdays. 

     Maybe we keep things that remind of us things we’ve done or places we’ve gone, like my miniatures collection. Sometimes we are drawn to things that complement our inner being. I have a friend who loves boxes; decorative, artsy, the tinier the better, and particularly those that nest. She also likes life to be nested within its lines, safely contained by rules, and to proceed in its pattern toward long-established and desirable goals.

     My husband doesn’t collect so much as he gathers. Perhaps as a hedge against the day we will run out of the skinny plastic sleeves the newspaper comes in, he will stash them in drawers for some undefined future use. He has learned to never start a sentence to me with the words “shouldn’t we keep. . .” lest he risk a withering stare and a march to the recycle bin.

    My collecting coexists uneasily alongside a frequent exhibition of Spartanism, which does not yet have its own entry in the journals, but should, under Traits All Mothers of Small Children Should Have. With Spartanism, you determinedly eject things from your life, such as the day I emptied my house of all the unconnected-to-anything cords, wires, chargers to things that no longer charge, extra long cables to a.v. equipment that doesn’t a. or v., and anything with the word coaxial in it. Although my friend Anne believes I really do still have every stitch of clothes I have ever bought since the early 80’s, I go through phases in which nothing in my or anyone else’s closet in my house is safe. I plead guilty to having pitched the paper while my husband was still reading it, and once got rid of a box of slides from my grandparents’ attic dating from the 50’s without even opening it. Oh please, you know you have one like that in the basement somewhere and just aren’t brave enough to pitch it.

    I have also deliberately sabotaged my collections, in order to keep them from growing. My last kitchen redo included a non-magnetic stainless steel refrigerator; now I have nowhere to display my hundreds of magnets, so it is OK to stop bringing them home. Some simply die a natural death; with the demise of smoking in public watering holes, no one makes matches with clever bar logos anymore. Does that make my thousands of matchbooks more or less interesting? With his transition from youthful ballcaps to nicer fedoras and brimmed hats, my husband doesn’t know what to do with his shelves of souvenir lids, but at least he is no longer compelled to buy them when we travel. 

      Maybe we collect in order to stave off the passing of time; if I have all the plastic Harpo’s cups from my sorority years, I can’t possibly be old enough to have a child looking at colleges, right?  Or to tie us to a certain time; I love using my grandmother’s china because it makes me feel her around my table, although she has been gone for decades.

    I am at the point in my life when purging is more attractive than acquiring. Unfortunately, so is my mother, and frequently her outlet is me; many the mom night when she brings another load of “my things,” which I reluctantly take, knowing these items of questionable sentiment will soon hit the Goodwill pile. I look forward to the inevitable downsizing of the house, as my clearing out will then finally have purpose and justification.

      Until then, I resolve that collecting will be as it should; narrow, focused, and only of those things meaningful and symbolic. However tempting it is to continue acquiring decorative plates for my kitchen, knowing that I now have enough is both liberating and satisfying. I will revel in the seashells I have without needing to pick up any more. I will collect experiences, and memories, and emotions; all things for which I have unlimited storage. Although I can never fit them in a display case, they will never be purged from my heart. Or have to be dusted.