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.