YEARS GONE

About an hour ago, I received a phone call from an old friend of mine, 
whom I haven't seen in almost fifteen years.  I knew him back in 
Connecticut, and, well, things happen, life happens, and we lost touch.  
We're getting together in a couple of hours for lunch.

This comes about for us all every now and then, this "getting back 
together" thing, By its nature, this sort of social contact becomes a 
point of recall; a time when everyone involved remembers the old days, 
and talks about the intervening ones.  A look back, in other words.  I'm 
not good at that.  I make it a point not to be nostalgic.  I never look 
back, if I can help it, or, if I can't, I do my best to keep the "good 
old days" in perspective, pairing them in my mind with the bad times 
that invariably went along with them, but which we're prone to 
forgetting.

Why do I do that?  Why do I cut off my past like that?  Well, first off, 
I don't.  What I try to do, though, is cut off the past from my 
emotions.  Did I have fun back then?  Was I crying?  Okay.  That's 
totally okay.  But the emotions THEN don't reflect my emotions now, nor 
the filter of my years that I must run them through.  Lots of people 
laugh when they recall the bad times, if they can see them with a 
detached eye.  I mean, distance from the situation can be liberating in 
that regard -- even for me.  But what is nostalgia if not a rewrite of 
one's personal history?  Or if those truly WERE the best days of your 
life, what does it make all the years that followed?  Second rate?  Less 
valuable?  Less fun?

I don't know...I've always maintained that my best days are ahead of me 
-- mostly because if I believed that they weren't, there'd be no reason 
to go on.  I'm certainly slower and fatter than in the old days.  But 
that only means that some of the things I valued then, some of the 
activities and, yes, even people, well, I no longer do.  See, since time 
changes us all, a person's self-value must derive from those changes, 
and not from the status of their past.  This philosophy requires a 
certain fluidity -- a certain willingness to re-invent yourself as time 
imposes change on you.  I'm slower and fatter now, so my value must come 
from things other than thinness and celerity.  Does that make my 
important things NOW less important than my important things THEN?  
Absolutely not, because if it did, that means I admit that my best days 
are now years gone, and they are not.  My greatest achievements in a 
certain arena might be, but if I no longer participate in those things, 
but instead, pursue others, what difference could it make?  If I was the 
lead in a series of stage plays once, and no longer am, what could it 
matter?  I'm not a stage actor any more.  I don't measure my personal 
worth by that yardstick any longer.

But visits like this one cause an unavoidable delving into the past, if 
only to be polite.  Certainly I won't dwell on it, no matter who 
initiates the topic, but courtesy requires a give-and-take.  At the very 
least, we're having sushi, so, even if the conversation falters, the 
meal will be fresh!

Saturday, June 25, 20211
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