Memento mori!
Remember your death!
[ soundtrack : Å Mor La Meg (Etter Thora Engseth) - Ragnhild Furebotten & Tore Bruvoll - Hekla Stålstrenga ]
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Will you accompany me for an existential stroll down memory lane?
It can’t be mundane woodworking every day of the week; man shall not live by bread alone. Indulge me!
This Christmas I want to give a digital photo album to my niece and nephew. I have many old, paper-based photos in a cardboard box; many of them given to me from my mother. She suffers from dementia now and is increasingly unable to remember anything. It’s heartbreaking to witness.
I want to hand over my family’s photographic legacy in a digital format to the young generation — so they may know their heritage and their roots and perhaps find succor in that. I suspect they will need that confidence.
This entails a lot of leisurely scanning and reawakening of old memories — and a few tears of bittersweet nostalgia.
There they are: All my childhood friends from fifty years ago. And I suddenly, without hesitation, remember all their names!
That must be what this is about:
How I miss those childhood days; how new the world was!
Each season, its joy — for a little boy.
And then you get your first bike, and the circumference of your world increases by an order of magnitude — a foretaste of future competence!
Summer holidays with friends later lost forever … RIP Marne! I will never forget our friendship! You live in my heart still.
… another summer, endless summer …
Just unsupervised freedom and childish exploration.
… and then you grow up and the world gets complicated.
You might be forced to volunteer to kill or get yourself killed …
You have to become an adult, yet no one has really told you what that entails.
Sometimes I think that the child that I know still lives inside of me is the most valuable part of myself. I can just about catch a glimpse of him in there, in an unguarded moment, now and then …
***
Only In Sleep
Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten —
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild —
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?
— Sara Teasdale
***
Such a great gift! I think there's no better trip down memory lane than going through old photos, and for the younger ones to learn something about their family history. I love going through piles and piles of old photos my parents and their parents have taken before me.
I enjoy all of your writing, but this was especially well executed.
Ten points.