Other Places, Other Days

Maybe it's because it's Autumn.

I mean, this is always a nostalgic season: the colors the last reminders of the brightness of summer, faded perhaps but somehow richer; the smells, that dry, dusty smell of the leaves, more of them on the ground now, and over all just a hint of woodsmoke; the crystalline light, the silver remnant of the molten gold that poured from the sky just a few weeks ago.

But I was not prepared for what happened, twice now since Sunday.

The first time, I was walking down a back street, heading for my favorite lunch place here in town, when suddenly I was on a different street: I was in Chile, thirty years and more ago, passing pastel-colored adobe houses with small, high windows and iron doors, on my way to my fiance's house, on my way to Amelia. The quality of the light was the way it had been all those years past; the smells were those of that long-ago street. It was as if a transparency had been dropped over the actual scene--a flicker, really, of that other place; a moment, and then it was gone. 

And then again, another glimmer of the past, but this time I was in the provincial capital where I had had my first job in Chile. Before me, laid over today's street stretched the shadowy outlines of that other street I had once followed, nervous but eager, walking up from the train station, past the shuttered noonday shops, past the plaza with its trees and shimmering gardens, the light warm and viscous, subtly resistant to my passing.

I've had memories of the past, sure; but never have I felt displaced, transported from this time to that, to some other place and time. And what was so strange was that, even in those brief moments, I felt myself actually to be in that place. I could feel the quality of the air on my skin, the warmth of the sun, the light reflected off those bright houses, then the transition into shadow under the flowering trees; I could sense the smells and noises of those places, real and yet obviously not.

The other bit of time travel happened as I was riding my bike along the old railroad bed that stretches between Wheaton and parts northwest, running through woods, past brooks and marshland, and, in this season, beautiful with the colors of the leaves.

I was enjoying the day, a warm blue sky above and the peaceful drowsiness of the trees as they fall asleep for the long winter. Suddenly, there on my right was a man mowing his grass. The green smell of his barbered lawn hovered thick and sweet in the afternoon air, and I thought of summers when I was a boy. Mowing the lawn had been my chore, my bane sometimes, and the core of my childhood income.

But never had I thought of how much I would miss those days, sweating in the hot yard, deafened by the machine I pushed for what seemed like hours. Today, though, I was overcome with such a longing for the simple pleasure of the fragrant grass, and for what it symbolized: a simpler time, before I had responsibilities, before I had set out in the world on my own. Before death had brushed past me on his way to gather up those I loved and carry them away.

And so all this was about distance and about time: the abyss of years and experience that yawns between the sober man of today, who has lived things he would never have chosen to know, and that younger man, walking up sundrenched streets filled with promise and a future--a woman, a job, an adventure; and that separates this white-haired pilgrim from that boy who swam through summer's light and the redolent liquor of the deep green grass.

Maybe this is what being old is about. I hope not; most days I don't feel old, not yet. But then how to think about this longing for other places, other times? How to carry the burden of the years?

Comments

[Aaron]

It is amazing how as time passes the space between years grows shorter.

(But you're not old yet!)