Thirty Eight and Eighty Three

I might have been eight or nine, I don't recall (like many things in my life, my past is nearly as blurry and clouded as my eyesight), but I had a book about rocks. I wasn't interested in rocks. I didn't even read (though I pretended I did by buying books like Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys so that my classmates thought that I, like them, enjoyed reading. Not that I didn't try, but I would read an entire page and forgot what I read and have to start over. Pretty soon it became pointless to me, and I didn't attempt to read anything of significance again till I was nearly in college). I was going to use this book. Make it a secret place to store — what I thought at the time — were significant things. So I got some scissors and started to cut a crooked rectangle through as many pages as my hands could push. I placed the book on the shelf with the other books I'd never read and let it keep it's secrets and memories.

I no longer remember what I put in the secret place — probably a few ticket stubs to a Phillies game I went to with my father, a torn out picture from an old Sears catalog of a woman in her bra and panties (I was pre-teen, these things happen), a few rocks from my backyard — but I found those objects important enough to me, at the time, to store them there in a place that would keep a memory for me. They have no monetary value, no objective purpose; but what do I keep now in my secret book of memories?

I could put ticket stubs of games I've attended with my dad, sand from the beach we go to every year, locks of hair from my three children, mementos from my honeymoon. I'd take the moment I saw my father — the strong and stoic patriarch — break down in tears and fear as he told me of my mom's cancer, the moments when I saw each of my children reach through into the light of this world and smelled their newborn breath and held their fragile bodies in my arms, and the moment my wife said I do on that hot July afternoon.

If I could somehow take all the joy and happiness, all the hurt and pain and sorrow, all the moments that made me stop and say inside "God, this I thank you for" and I'd place them in this book, on a shelf, and let them live for me to reminiscence about again someday when I'm much older, much grayer, much closer to the ending than the beginning of my story. I'll take them out and I'll hold them long and close, feel their texture and smell their time past and drink their pain and sorrow, happiness and joy. Then I'll put them back and close the book and let it endure through my children, my friends, whatever loosely created legacy and story there is left of me when this time passes by me.

In the meantime I'll live.

I'll imbib every moment with glittened and faded eyes, not letting the worry of making things important and meanginful obscure what is right in from of me, but allow every moment to be.