Alert the media! Blogger found alive!
An apology would be polite, but I'm not inclined to offer one. The nature of time itself takes on different aspects as one moves through the stages of life. It's one of those things that overtake us without reference to our desires.
I came across a fragment of a poem used as the heading of a chapter in a nice book that I'm in the middle of. It hit me as illuminating a bizarre epiphany-like experience that I had last year. My two sons, both good men by all accounts, are now officially in middle age, which means that the experiences of their lives are beginning to take on new aspects for them as well. My oldest contacts me by the Line app or e-mail about one time per year; my youngster, much less frequently. I had always been proud of them, and I had a firm belief that I had been an okay father. It seems that even that estimation may have been overly optimistic.
I know that poetry is avoided by more clever bloggers, being the boring literary equivalent of someone talking about their dreams. But here's the fragment:
Poem title: A German Requiem, by James Fenton, an Englishman
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
(It continues...)
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
This was quite a kick in the chest for me. What I realized last year, thanks to my son's concise prompting, was that I was living in a dream world. I was nothing like the middling and kind of okay dad and husband that I had considered myself to have been.
I had forced myself to remember only what I had built, ignoring what I had knocked down. I was concentrating on the houses, when I would have done better to pay more attention to the spaces in between the houses.
I was considering only my memories, even though I am quite familiar with my survival technique of enforcing a strict policy of forgetting many of the things that had happened to me and, I'm afraid, many of the things that I had done.
Porco dio, how I hate being old. No surprise though. I also hated being a boy, being an adolescent, being a young man, being a grown up, being middle aged, and everything in between. I was a baby that failed to thrive, but lacked the dignity to die.
