Re-Reading the Past

           I’ve spent time these last couple of days going through old boxes, trying to clear space, lighten my load. This afternoon, I tackled some boxes filled mostly with documents, and sorting through them has plunged me into nostalgia and bittersweet reflection. Unless you are scrupulous about keeping your papers organized, you can probably relate to the experience. It probably doesn’t help that all the while I’ve been listening to an internet radio station playing r&b hits from my youth and young adulthood.

I made a major life move in 1993, another in 2002 and another in 2015. Each time, desk drawers were emptied into boxes, and small boxes emptied into larger boxes. And the contents of at least some of those boxes have remained unsorted since the day they were packed. Now, with no move pending, and with the leisure of retirement, I’m actually taking time to examine contents I’d done no more than glance at for as much as twenty years and more. Over that long stretch of time, I’d forgotten so much of what I once tucked away, and the reasons why.

Resumes, job descriptions, applications and hiring papers; drafts and rejection slips of submitted stories; outlines and scraps of stories I never finished, or never started; library cards and drivers licenses from the several cities, states, province I’ve lived in; school papers written out longhand with teachers’ comments in the margins; pay stubs and tax forms; work plans, layoff notices and evaluations from jobs both remembered and forgotten; tickets or playbills from concerts, movies, plays and talks; proposals and descriptions of volunteer projects I was involved with. And oh, the photos … and all the cards and letters, many from people still in my life, but so many more from those I’m connected to no longer.

The photos: they bring back wonderful times, sad times, lost times. They remind me of the many places I’ve been, to live, to visit or for work, or just passing through. The overwhelming majority of them bear no date and no names. I can still approximate most of them, but to situate some would amount to pure guess work. There are quite a few faces I remember without being able to attach a name or exact relationship. And then there are those faces I don’t remember at all. Did I know this person? It appears that I did. I can sometimes suss out a slight emotional flutter that suggests the quality of the connection, but sometimes not even that.

Often the photos carry me right into a relationship, a place, a span of time that had a strong emotional impact on my life. Other times, the image makes such a thin impression that I have to second guess the still vivid memories of what a person or place meant to me. Is what I now feel something direct from that experience, or is it something I’ve concocted since?

But it’s the letters that have hit me most. I’m astonished at the wealth of beautiful, rich correspondences I’ve enjoyed over so much of my life. I remember that there was a time when I wrote letters regularly to multiple people, but the extent, the breadth and the duration of them surprises me. A big portion of these letters are from lovers and would be lovers, but there are so many exchanges with friends, relatives, people I worked or studied with for a time or met while travelling. And a few are with the parents or children of my lovers, people with whom the relationship transcended the structure of our beginning. I guess that in some sense, this transcendence is what so many of these relationships and the letters that flowed from them have in common. On paper we began or continued to share deeply and personally, and that sharing got a response, and bonds were formed.

Does this depth and honesty of sharing arise via email. Certainly it can, and it does. And yet, it’s different. I don’t remember the last time I penned a letter, but some wonderful correspondence still comes my way electronically. There are even advantages with email: editing is much easier and emotionally freer, emails can come and go so quickly, and you always maintain a record of your own part of the exchange.

But there is something wonderful about writing out – or typing out – a letter. The slowness of the process is as much an advantage as a disadvantage. The time involved – both in the composition and the transmission – acts as a kind of tenderizer and seasoning almost. There’s even something or other that comes from the waiting – from going to the mailbox and discovering that, no, it’ll be at least another day, or conversely, that waiting has suddenly ended.

Today, as I read over so many old, mostly forgotten letters, I was reminded of what a special space letter-writing can create. One that I was especially touched by was from the mother of a woman I had a long, up and down, never-quite-settled-into-what-might-have-been relationship with. The three of us lived in a geographic triangle of cities, and girlfriend took me for visits to mom a number of times, to the point where mom and I became friends, and I even visited when I was there on my own. In her letter, mom acknowledges not having answered my own letter to her more than two years earlier. She and her husband had divorced – which I knew from her daughter – and she shared with me the emotional roller-coaster that she and the entire family had been on.

By then, her daughter and I had each met and married other partners. And mom’s words to me included that she’d always hoped her daughter and I would marry, but also her pleasure that daughter and I were still friends (as we are to this day, a quarter century later). She said that she’d been meaning to write me for some time, and she spent much of the day at the task, as she documented. As I re-read the letter today, I was taken back to that time, to my and our visits, to the warmth she always showed me. And I was reminded of the mystery and the spiritual magic of relationship, family, love and longing. I’m sure that I wrote mom back, but I can’t remember what I might have written. Nor can I find any later letter from her. But I know that she died a couple of years later, and I have the funeral notice that her daughter sent me.

It was reading that letter, and some others, that brought me to this post, that generated this deep mixture of emotion I’ve been feeling these last hours, as much gratitude as sadness. Sure, the paper documents are only the trace artifacts of something much larger, but they are also what remains when the rest is past. And thus, they conjure thoughts of both mortality and of eternity. What’s become of all these connections, all these loved ones? So many, too many, are gone from my life, and I feel guilt about that, because I know I haven’t always kept up my end of what amounts to a labor of love. I feel no animosity towards those who dropped out on their end, but I do miss and wonder about them.

The discovery of one batch of letters from a younger, female co-worker whom I had a wonderful big brother-little sister connection with drove me to seek her on Facebook. And I found her, with lots of photos showing her looking much the same but with the added twenty years since our correspondence ended. Why, how it ended, I can’t remember. I see her in her new life and wonder: is there still room in her life for a big brother? Still space in my own for a little sister? Who knows? Time changes so much. And as Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is a time for everything; and a season for every activity under the heavens”. A time for re-kindling, and a time for letting go. Which shall it be? Yes. Bittersweet.