An Old Movie

It's almost like watching a favorite old movie for the first time in many years.  You know all the scenes, and all the lines.  You know the actors and the outcome.   Something approaching deja vu, but not quite, because while the scenes and characters are familiar and the same, the effect they bring about  is now distorted through the lens of time.

  That's a bit of the feeling I have had, moving back to my home town.

It's kind of  funny, because it's not like I was gone a long time.  Only a year and a half.  But the town I moved back to is not the town I left when I moved out after my marriage fell apart.  It is more like the town I left when I   moved away for college twenty four (gulp) years ago.  Wait.  That's not right.  A quick consultation with my calculator tells me that it has been more than twenty seven (bigger gulp) years since I left for college.  But I digress.  What I am trying to relate is that I not only moved back to town, I moved back in time.

This came to me as I was walking around town one evening, no kids at home and nothing better to do than get some fresh air and exercise under the starry sky.  That's when the movie metaphor hit me, it almost felt like I was on a set;  same streets, same sky, same houses, even some of the same characters, but a different time.  It reminded me of when I was a teen, walking or riding my bike on these same streets under the same sky.  Going to or from my job at the Inn in town or a friend's house.  The buildings are still there but the friends are gone, most of them any way.  And those that stayed or returned, like me, are now different people.  Aged and distorted like one of those time lapse effects in a show on Discovery or National Geographic;  a bud springs from a dormant patch of earth or a seemingly dead branch on a tree, and quickly it explodes in size and color like a fourth of July firework.  Just as quickly ( and also like those fireworks)  the colors fade from the petals as they first wither and droop and then they fall away.
  I feel lucky.  I feel like possibly, this is the sequel to that favorite old movie, the rare sequel that's better than the original.  The second segment in the flower time lapse;  after the beautiful but short lived flower has dried and blown away.  If I'm lucky, it's the part where fruit is born and seeds are sewn and a new cycle/sequel begins.  Same earth.  Same tree.  Same Place.  But a new seed, a new flower, a new fruit, a new life in a new time.  But it feels like an old time.



                                                                  -epilog-

Maybe you can tell from the change in tone midway through this post, but I had started it late last Fall   right after I moved back and didn't get to finish, so I decided to come back to it now; and the result is a bit uneven.  I think what I was originally going for was an attempt to convey the surreal aspect of moving back to my hometown, the same yet different, and how it felt like so much time had passed when in reality it was  a lot of life that had passed during only a brief time.  When I began writing again I jumped (maybe a little too hard) on the movie metaphor, milking it so hard as to obscure the original thought.  Oh well.
  Coincidentally if not ironically (always easy to mix or confuse them) Vermont native Jay Craven  was in town just recently filming a few scenes for an upcoming movie "Northern Borders" based on the great book by Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher.  Kind of a coming of age story of a boy on his grandparents farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.  (Craven also produced "Where the Rivers Flow North" and "A Stranger in theKingdom" both also based on books by Mosher.) Kinda cool. It was filmed at the train station just down the street from my childhood home, where I spent a lot of time, sold a lot of lemonade to the tourists, conductors and the engineer of the train and risked derailing the train every time we placed a penny on the track to see it get flattened.

Peace to the Planet...

Summer's memories

The first day of Summer.  The last day of school. It's days like this that make me want to be a kid again, with a summer full of adventure and carefree days ahead. Hot sunny days, long cool evenings, and a little thunder and lightning to liven things up.
  For me summer was primarily spent at the town pool, the town's social center back then.  Other than an occasional weekend (or the annual week long) at my Grandparents house at the Maine shore, I was either at the pool, at a neighborhood friend's house, or riding my bike somewhere in between. (no camp or grand vacations for me and my seven siblings)  Simple times.  Good times.
  There was nothing like those summers when I was 9-12.  Old enough to be independent (back then) and too young to have a job, girlfriend, a car or a care.  If you didn't find any change in the deep end of the pool, you could round up five bottles or cans and the 25 cents would get you a candy bar or a soda.  Life was good.
  Summertime and the livin was easy....
  Looking back I remember being anxious to grow up and experience all life had to offer. But looking back also makes me realize that in many ways (not all) that was a nearly perfect age and time, not exactly all downhill from there but, in so many ways it was a pinnacle of sorts.  (Coincidentally {or is it ironically}the rec area where the town pool was located was known as "The Pinnacle" {on Lover's Lane no less}).
How does that quote go?-if only I knew then what I know now...no, even better the line from the Bob Dylan/Byrds song-My Back Pages--I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.


Just looked up some of the #1 hits of 1977 and had a few laughs....some definite classics like Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night" (didn't know for the longest time what it was the night for...) and the Eagles' "Hotel  California" but then there's Shaun Cassidy's "DaDooRonRon", David Soul's "Don't Give up on Us" and a couple of Andy Gibb's bubblegum classics.  A crazy musical era that was punctuated by disco (ABBA and the Bee Gees), country rock (Eagles, Glen Campbell), funk (KC and the Sunshine Band and Rose Royce) Soul/R+B (Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder), crap (Mary McGregor and Debbi Boone) and utter crap (Barry Manilow, Cassidy and Gibb).  Thankfully there were a few nuggets that still stand the test of time.
Here's the link for all the #1 hits of 1977 so you can look, laugh and reminisce for yourself...

Peace to the Planet....

Memories

  Talk about life being a learning process...I always thought a memory was just that , simply a memory, static and unchanging (fading a bit maybe...).  Bad memories get filed away, left alone, drawn on only to put something worse in perspective.  Good memories are relished, relived, retold and treasured.  But what happens when a good memory is now more pain than pleasure?
  How does that happen?  I certainly never thought about it and never really considered the possibility.  Not before my divorce.  The dichotomy has been slapping me in the face as I have been going throught the painful process of having my life and marriage torn apart.
  I have one of those screensavers that is a slideshow of all my photo files. It's great-pictures of the kids through the years, current shots randomly followed by baby photos, silly faces, vacations, soccer games, ballet recitals.  Then there are the shots of me and the ex dressed to the nines for a friends wedding,  self taken shots (my signature-arm extended, subjects slightly off center) of us on the beach kissing,  birthdays or better (worse?) both of us elated and exhausted (her more than me) after the birth of our son.  Painful.  It's hard to fathom when I stop and realize that;  two years ago these images/memories brought a smile, a year ago they brought a bit of hope, and now they bring pain and regret.
  I think my ex is further along in the process (in fact I know she is) because she is (still/again?) able to look back on these things fondly.  Maybe someday I will too but I am definitely not there yet.  Yes they were good times, happy times, times I appreciated in the moment, but not enough-I took them for granted.  Or rather I took for granted the fact that they would continue indefinitely.  That's where the pain comes from-not from the good memory, but the realization that there will be no more.  Not that I don't think I will ever have anything in the future to be happy about or to look back on  happily.  But it's the break in the continuum,  an end of that particular timeline.  The shared history and shared experiences are not lost, but they won't continue either.  That meant a lot to me.  We had been together nearly twenty years- that's a lot of history shared.  But because we're not together, we don't really share that history-it's just something we have in common.
  Time (or what happens during that time-also known as life) is like magic-it has an amazing way of putting things in (a different) perspective.  Whether it's marriage or divorce, births or deaths, basically beginnings or endings-everything changes over time, and our perspective on memories-good or bad-is no exception.
  I do look forward to a time in the future when I have created a new history, with new memories, and new shared experiences that will stay that way-shared.

Peace to the planet...