Reminiscence

Friends,

I’m writing this evening from So. Portland, Maine, where I lived for 27 years before moving to Whidbey Island, WA, in 2006. I am visiting my son and his family, and this afternoon we took a tour of our "old stomping grounds:” schools, work sites, sandwich shops, the waterfront and lighthouses, among others. My heart went bouncing around with reminiscences of the many sites and experiences while raising the two boys during their school years. Instead of lumping all those years together, with each turn on the road it seemed another distinct memory would flash by like a momentary scene of my life’s movie highlights. As we age especially, I assume all of us are revisiting our lives, in real time, like my reporting from actual locations in my life, or virtually through our private reveries, or in conversations with family or friends. 

And while we are reliving the past, we also need to deal with the present going forward. I am reminded of the wisdom that there are three things we want in our later years: we want to be as pain free as possible; we want to be free of becoming a burden; and we want to tell our stories. There are nuances to these requests, of course, but they really do summarize well the expectations we may have as we age. It is actually impossible to have reliable aspirations that we will be able to fulfill these hopes because of the uncertainty of our end-of-life health issues that will always be the major “black box” in the planning process. 

The one part of the above want list we can best control is how intentional we are about telling our stories. The obvious ways to tell our stories are to join with friends in morning coffee klatches, meet-ups, book clubs, worshipping communities, phone or electronic conversations with old friends, or other situations where our shared stories are encouraged and welcomed. Or, if we are inclined, we can make recordings, perhaps being interviewed by a family member such as  a grandchild. Or we can, as I am, write about our lives in the form of a memoir.

 I’m choosing to try to write a memoir to allow myself to go back through my memories of the people and events in various eras of my life. As I try to retrieve memories. I have found it most helpful to imagine myself back in a particular place at a particular time. I think of the people; what the place looked like and smelled like; what I was doing (or supposed to be doing!); what feelings I associate with a particular awkward or rewarding situation in my life. I have started by keeping a loose-leaf binder with sections assigned to particular segments in my life, and then I try to imagine various events associated with that era. What can I remember about my teen years, or my time abroad, for example?  And I try to piece them all together, both chronologically and how they impacted the rest of my life. Meeting a conscientious US Air Force pilot in Thailand in 1967, for example, who told me he was secretly and illegally bombing Laos  put me on the arc to my lifelong anti-war commitment. I intend the final result of the memoir is to record my personal journey through the complexity of engagement I have experienced in this momentous period of history. I want to record for myself and my family, with all due humility, all the good fortune, grace, and advantages I have had in life. My memoir thus becomes a sort of a miracle that it all has actually happened and to be grateful for it all.

I think it is important, at any age, to take the time to process and evaluate the meaning of our lives. We can never satisfactorily respond to the wonderment such an inquiry invites, but I think our lives are enriched when we see our lives “from the balcony.” Being alive and conscious of the miracle of it all, and then to live long enough be able to acknowledge it with humble gratitude, is a great privilege. 

In terms of life’s gratitudes for all those “old stomping grounds,” I especially appreciate Pete Seeger’s little ditty about aging, with the chorus: “How do I know my youth is all spent, and my get and go, got up and went, but in spite of it all I'm able to grin, and think of all the places my get up has been.” So here’s to all the places our “get up” has been, and where it still may go.

In gratitude and peace,
Tom