I notice I'm having a lot more trouble figuring out when it is, the older I get. I mean that exactly like I said it. I can't always tell when the time I am currently experiencing actually happened. I think it might have always been this way to some extent, but it really started bothering me about the time I gained the ability to pause and rewind live television. Wanting to be able to back up a couple minutes at a concert or speech, because I spaced out and missed a section, happens all the time, but it doesn't really throw off my stride. It's when it becomes a matter of watching someone performing an action, and wondering when this occurred, it starts to worry me a bit. I've started watching all sporting events like they are already concluded, and if I checked the score on my phone, I'd find out who won or lost, before the first half is even concluded. And it gets really disorienting when I look at children, and think they are already grown up, and I'm just looking at an old photograph of them. It works in reverse too. I can't look at the face of a much older person, without really picking it apart, and trying to see in them the people they were in high school, when their faces were unlined, their hair was thick and more richly colored, and they had yet to lose their swagger. I can't seem to accept when I am looking at right now.
Is this really common in people my age (and older)? Do you lose track of what year it is, and really have to think about it sometimes? I know we all have deep periods of nostalgia, liking to think back to happy periods in our past, clinging to pop culture memories and achievements from our glory days. But I think there is a difference between remembering fondly and feeling like you are entirely transported to a place in the past. I've started thinking of time not as a linear construct that you cannot touch, but rather as an undulating membrane, with the ability for different places along that membrane to brush against each other just lightly enough for the sensation of another time to creep across your conscience. No, I don't mean actual time travel. I mean like how you can hear or smell something, and in your mind's eye, you are completely enveloped by that other time and place. Sometimes that feeling is so strong, I really have to focus to realize I haven't gone anywhere dramatic. For the last few years, I feel like my time membrane has been snagged against 1978. It keeps brushing up against me, and I have to say, I really like it. I told someone about this a while back, and they asked me what was so special about that year that I would want to cling to it, and keep revisiting it. At first I thought maybe it was the last year I really felt like a child. I was still in elementary school, and although my parents had recently divorced, I didn't feel like it had affected me negatively. All of my grandparents were still alive, even my great-grandmother, and I had moved back to Oklahoma to live close to them. But on further reflection, I realized this can't possibly be the answer. The things that I'm getting from the late 1970s are not the trappings of a child. I was aware of music and fashion and the like at the time, but not like I am getting during these flashbacks. The perceptions I have from that time frame seem far too adult-oriented to have been my own experiences. It's like having the sensation of having been a twenty-five year old, living in New York, at the same time I was a ten year old living in Oklahoma. It is utterly impossible, and it makes no sense to me.
I think what made me start down this path, was looking at the kitten a few nights ago, with her skinny little baby proportions, and wonder how she was going to look as an adult. I am sure she'll plump up after her surgery (we all do). And her fur will fill in when it isn't getting burned up like a bottle blonde every week. It made me want to take even more pictures of her than I already do. I came across baby pictures of my Minions of Chaos, the other black cat and the black and white boy, on the day they were adopted, and if I go digging on my desktop computer, I will find pictures of my calico and her sister when they were little. We have very few pictures of the old man from his kittenhood. There was one floating around the house for a while, but I don't know where it is. I don't think it was ever scanned into a digital file, but I will look.
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