Time, You Thief

While many columnists like to reminisce about the old year, I choose to present a morality lesson instead.  Several years ago, my husband and I were in Southwestern Minnesota and spent a day searching the streets of Luverne for the home I lived in for barely two years of ultimate childhood bliss. 

            My time in Luverne gave me a small town’s view of the world; the kind of view that can only belong to an eight year old with the run of a whole town.  My mother’s only rule was that we couldn’t go to the dump.  Mom would emphasize her point with a wagging finger.  “There are rats in that dump with teeth longer than your legs!”   I’m not sure what she meant by this statement, but we went to the dump any way. 

My father gave me full access to the creamery where he worked.  We lived in a company owned house across the parking lot from the creamery and I was always poking my nose in and out of the vats, grabbing handfuls of butter and gobbling them down on the run.  I like to think I was a moppet, but, “pest” is probably the better term. 

My days in Luverne seemed to be one adventure after another.  I would collect crawdads from the creek and, just once, stored them in my mother’s wringer washing machine for safe keeping.  Mother discovered them later that afternoon when the smell was pervasive.  Without even asking which of her three daughters might have put the creatures in the washer she yelled for me. 

Were these really the best years of my life?  That answer is much harder than a simple yes or no.  Like most superlatives, “best” is a very large word.  The house I lived in was humble.  The times were hard.  Certainly, in the world at large, 1953 was hardly an idyllic time.  As a young child I was blissfully ignorant of segregation in the South, the end of the Korean War, and the repression of Stalinist Russia.  The best years of our lives, the best times of history, the best people of our or anyone else’s time are only remembered in snapshots.  The foreground of these mental pictures may be in sharp focus, but the background is always blurred.  Nostalgia is a master of disguise.  We may think we want the sweet comfort of a pleasant past when what we really want is escape from a present complication.  Perhaps the past appeals to us because its problems are at least managed if not solved.  We have taken the measure of those years and we know the worst, as well as the best, they can do.  There is no fear for the unknown.  The greatest happiness of our lives might lie ahead, but it frequently comes in the form of a choice between two closed doors.  Will it be the lady or the tiger?  Past contentment may seem a safer bet than future bliss.  It is easy for nostalgia to become an emotional trap.

Walt Whitman must have felt some of the same misgivings about reminiscence, as well as the optimism I feel for the future.  In his poem, “The Untold Want” he says, in two lines what I believe is a legitimate desire.

            “The untold want by life and land ne’er granted

             Now, voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.”

I resolve that my favorite year is always going to be the one just ahead, and I will leave this world without it owing me a single thing. 

Bon Voyage, and keep the faith.