Time traveling

Mountains from Canyon Ridge last Thursday

I woke up in the middle of the night with this Bob Dylan phrase in my head:

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now

 And of course since we live in the internet age, I was able to find all the lyrics to the entire song, one called "My Back Pages" on an album I must have heard ages ago. I know I smiled when I heard that phrase, because it reminded me of how much I thought I knew once long ago, before it became obvious that the young pedantic girl who thought she knew everything would be learning life's hard lessons.

I remember sitting at the dinner table (before I left home at eighteen) and imparting to my parents some piece of knowledge that I thought they didn't already know, thinking it was my duty to enlighten them. Oh, I was definitely so much older then. Today I realize how very little I really know about life and about love. I know I loved my parents very much and when I let myself, I can miss them both terribly. It's been decades since we sat around that table and now I only have the remembrance of those long-ago days.

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of the day my son Chris died. I thought of him often during the day, remembering him as a young boy and also as a grown man. He had left the country when he joined the Army and had married and settled down in Germany, so I hadn't seen him for a couple of years when he died of a heart attack. I traveled there for the funeral and saw him one last time in a glass-covered casket, dressed in his uniform. It took more than a year before any other images of Chris would surface when I thought of him, but today I only remember the good times we had together, and the images of him as a child stand out in memory. He was a beautiful person, and every once in awhile he still visits me in my dreams. He always appears as a boy around ten or so, just before puberty, and there are times when we spend what seems like hours together on some adventure or other. Those dreams make me feel as though he's close by, easy to reach across the veil.

Although the passage of time is so incremental that change doesn't often show itself on a daily basis, as I've grown older I see the wisdom in keeping photographs that allow me to mark the changes in my loved ones and in myself. Not that I need all that much reminding about my own personal aging process, since it's obvious that the young girl I once was is no longer present. There is something very different about having turned seventy; there is no longer even a little bit of that young girl hanging around. It's perfectly okay to have become invisible when I walk down the street, no longer an object of youth and beauty. I don't miss it, but sometimes my eye alights on a young beautiful creature and I remember that I was once like that too. I can delight in the youth and beauty of others and feel glad.

There is a sense of self-consciousness that has also left, along with my youth. When I was growing up, I suffered from stage fright and simply hated to be forced to stand in the front of the class and be singled out from the others. Just thinking about it makes my cheeks turn red and I can feel the sense of dread that I felt. But somehow or other, that changed as I grew older. As an instructor for several years, I remember wondering at the beginning if I would be able to teach without embarrassment, but I learned that if I had knowledge to impart that was necessary for the student to learn, there was no fear at all. I suppose that if I were not prepared for it, and for some reason I was singled out in a classroom setting today, it might return, but I wonder. I am still quite conscious of myself, but it's different now.

It's true that I expose my own personal self in ways I never thought I could, right here in this blog. I write about my innermost thoughts and feelings, my fears and joys, and there is no sense that someone might be able to hurt me with that knowledge. Of course, there are things I could write about that I choose not to, for the simple reason that I know that anybody in the world with this web address can read what I write here, and some people might be offended and choose to attack me because of my beliefs. I've seen it happen to others and I protect myself as well as I can from them by not writing about sex, politics, or religion. Although I don't at this time see a need to use it, I'm glad that Blogspot gives me the option to review comments before they are posted.

And about time traveling: when I think back just a decade or two ago about what I might have thought would become obsolete in today's world, I would have been completely wrong. The advent of the internet and the digital age has changed everything. I read recently that DVDs and CDs are soon to become a thing of the past, as we are moving towards streaming everything. Kodak and film cameras are gone, and encyclopedias and dictionaries are now on line. When I leave the house, I put a small computer called a smartphone in my pocket and have the entire digital world available to me as I walk around and carry out my daily life. What a world!

And back to the world around me. Now that I have traveled through time, I stop and look around: the laptop with its tapping keys as I write, the empty teacup beside me on the nightstand, and of course my dear partner still sleeping beside me. It's Sunday morning again, and here I am beginning my day with my only self-imposed task almost finished. I've returned to the present, and as I think of you, my dear readers, I am filled with a sense of joy and gratitude for the life I am able to live today, right here, right now. I know it will change, but for now, we are together. I give thanks every day for the chance to know you through this amazing exchange we are privileged to share. I send you my sincere wish for you to have a week filled with adventure and joy.