What we all forget from time to time
Published 12:00 am Sunday, June 29, 2014
If you venture into the yard after nightfall this time of year, tiny blinking lights catch your eye.
Over near the azaleas. Just above the grass. Then suddenly all around.
Lightning bugs.
Silently they glow off and on, here and there, reminding me of childhood days when we captured lightning bugs in jars, punched holes in the lids and waited for the bugs to glow off and on all night.
They might have glowed a few times more — bioluminescence, I now know. But they didn’t last long.
So it was when we were young. We expected everything we knew to go on forever. Even lightning bugs.
But things change. People change, bit by bit.
The question is, can we change back? Would we want to? A book I came across recently prompted this line of thought.
In “What Alice Forgot,” a novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty, heroine Alice suffers amnesia after falling off a stationary bicycle in spin class and bumping her head. The 39-year-old mother of three comes to with no recollection of the past 10 years. She thinks she’s 29, and tells the paramedics she’s pregnant with her first child.
She doesn’t even remember that she and her husband are getting a divorce.
As the story progresses, the differences between Alice at 29 and Alice at 39 become clear. Stark, even.
The younger Alice was a little goofy and shy, very sentimental, sensitive to others’ feelings and optimistic about the future.
After 10 years of child-rearing and her husband’s growing preoccupation with work, Alice is hardly herself anymore. She’s running a busy household single-handedly; getting three children dressed, fed and off to school every day; volunteering in the community and working out like a maniac, all fueled by high-octane coffee. She rushes about in a state of constant efficiency.
Run your own mental clock back to B.C. time — before children — and remember what you were like then. I’d have to lose more than half my memory to fully return to those days 33 years ago.
In Alice’s case, she had become so caught up in the busy-ness of life that she lost touch with old friends and once-close family members.
But the biggest change in Alice is how far she’s drifted from her true self.
Alice is shocked by her older, more materialistic self, sporting elegant clothes and hanging out with the kind of women she used to abhor, the gossipy, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses types.
It’s one thing to mature and take on more responsibilities, another to lose sight of or ignore the buoys that used to guide your life — loyalty, compassion, hope.
This fictional character is not so different from most of us. It’s a truism that you can’t make a person change — can’t make a chronic liar turn truthful, can’t make a dreamer into an action planner. But time and experience change us all. We learn, often from our own mistakes, and wise up.
Remember the neoconservatives, liberals who have been mugged by reality? Life does not turn everyone into a political conservative, but it certainly tempers idealism and naivete.
It’s funny what can take us back to our old selves. A song on the radio. The scent of honeysuckle. The taste of strawberry ice cream. Lightning bugs glowing in the dark.
A different feeling stirs in your chest, the joy of finding something wonderful when you weren’t even looking for it, a flash of memory, quickly tempered by a sense of loss. If only …
I’m not sure if we pine for simpler times or for our purer selves, before the drip, drip, drip of reality reshaped our characters the way a flowing river reshapes rocks.
I would not mind going back to 29, with two small children and another a couple of years away. I miss the Munchkin voices and infinite supply of hugs.
Then I remember the diapers and laundry.
In some ways those flashes of memory are like lightning bugs — something you really can’t capture for long. As a child, I chased them. Now, if I’m lucky, I pause and appreciate the moment.
That’s all. And maybe that’s enough.
Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.