Chronometry Redux

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad–George Bernard Shaw

The new year was gliding along, mostly smooth with a hint of ripples. And then a tsunami blew in as a reminder that we are not in control.

My goal, the only one for this new year, was to be open and aware to all that life has to give. Sounds simple, right? It’s the state of mind that keeps us walking instead of stumbling down life’s road. But then comes a reminder of the impermanence of life.  A woman I have known for many years is dying. She is at home, refusing treatment for advanced pancreatic cancer. Her family rallies around her morphine soothed body and mind as she heads towards another beginning, whether we call it rebirth (Buddhism) or for the Christian faith, a passage to eternity.

The shock for me was that I had not missed seeing her for some time now and had not wondered how she was. I suddenly missed her smile, her easy laughter and her kindness. I remembered dinner parties and holiday get-togethers. How, so very easily, she slipped through a gap. I started thinking about how time goes on, each day filled with minutiae that eats up minutes that appear to speed up as the years roll on. Yep, I wrote a rant about that a few months back.

I thought back to the last time I saw her and realized how many other friends I had lost touch with. What is going on in their lives? Are they okay or are they going through some kind of trauma? Is it my place to even know? Can I help or hinder? My friends and I are of that certain age that renders us vulnerable to so many physical and mental dilemmas that we were able to ignore when younger.

Then I remembered a short piece I wrote for The Waking section of Ruminate Magazine a few years ago. It’s a nostalgic piece about this wonderful neighborhood I live in, when I walked dogs daily and knew everyone on these streets. Back before Covid when we still had neighborhood Christmas parties and knew how everyone was faring, at least on the outside periphery of daily life. Sadly, everything has changed. But those changes were already underway; I just wasn’t aware.

I’d like to share this short piece, in honor of my friend. It was published in 2019.

CHRONOMETRY

We walk, my age-deaf dogs and me. The street light throws my shadow ahead of us. It moves lithely along, stretched slim. In the dark, I can be young and pretty again instead of old and …handsome. My softness is gone now, like my dogs’ hearing. The three of us live in a harder world: the planes of my face sharp; the ears of my old dogs closed unwittingly to my voice, with only the lines of my sharp expressions to understand my commands.

At night the dogs and I stroll through this familiar neighborhood we have loved for twenty years, past the homes where everything has changed:

the stately mansion across the street where Nan and Jack held a grand dinner party, tables spilling onto the veranda filled with new friends to celebrate our inclusion in the neighborhood;

the brick house where retired city building inspector and widower Henry brought his love of hobby trains to life in the garage, the child-sized model train chugging round and round on tracks, the choo-choo whistle entrancing my then five year-old son;

the pink stucco on the corner where kind Judy nursed her dying husband and sent him off with dignity before she was placed into assisted living by her daughter, and where she languished just long enough for two visits before dying of sadness;

 up the hill past the two tiny matching clapboard houses that Chris and Sophia bought as investments and were fortunate to sell after the real estate bubble burst in 2008, where now a quiet gay couple keeps seasonal plants on display in an old yellow wheelbarrow in the front yard;

past the cottage where the same neighbor first lived until he and his wife moved to the big house one street over, where now an agonized chain-smoking woman lives with undiagnosed physical pain and a lonely marriage, and a floppy-eared schnauzer sits out front to wait anxiously for his Master to come home;

past the ugly chipped-paint bungalow which used to have a eucalyptus tree that gave it charm but now doesn’t, and where an adorable pug named Bingo snorts hello before sniffing my bitches anal glands, ever hopeful;

on past the trim ranch house where Henry’s daughter Sheri used to live but now rents to a young childless couple with a tawny dog named Toby they sometimes tie to the orange tree in the front yard;

past the old Elliott house that now contains the new generation of Elliotts, a young couple with two boys who love to fish, boat proudly displayed in the front yard next to an old Ford pick-up;

and finally, at the dead end leading into the woods, the carriage house where Nan lived after Jack died, when her son and his family moved into the stately home that welcomed us into the neighborhood twenty years ago.

Hard reminders of time passing.

A synonym of hard is strong and of time is continuance.

We continue on strong, walking at night and remembering, my dogs and me.