For Always
The “here and now” is currently overwhelming. My projects include repairing my 838, catching up in Calc III, attending offices and the dental convention for the pre-dental co-op, finding time to return the multimeter that Professor Mowry so generously loaned me, finding new weight gloves, finalizing my school schedule for next year and this summer, polishing this catchy new piano riff, supporting Katy in her search for an apartment (she’s going to the U — yay for my sister being a graduate math student!), photographing South Campus for Katy’s memories, finding new lifting shirts, finding a summer job/internship, keeping my room clean, sleeping, and ending world hunger.
Scratch that last one.
Perhaps, then, you can understand my recent journey into memory. You know, when you drift off into the distant past and find yourself surrounded by the sights and sounds of a different time. Me, I’m down in southern Minnesota camping again, about five years ago now. As the sun was setting, I went out on the lake canoeing for the last time that day. Fetched the canoe, jumped in, paddled, and suddenly found myself in the middle of a still blue jewel. I faced southwest as the sun slowly sank on my right and realized the moment I was in was something special. The metallic pings and scrapes of those tending to campfire meals drifted gently out over the water. No highways for miles, no shopping malls for counties. The greenery provided a perfect sash between the velvet red and azure of the evenining sky and the mirror of the lake. I looked at it all intently, soaking it in, and then allowing my eyelids to gently droop, letting my senses roam out, experiencing the pervasive calm at the day’s end. I do not remember what came before, or what came after, but that moment in my life is a time of peace and harmony I know I can always return to. Some things never leave you.
But later, I was again drifting back to another memory. Four summers ago already (I suppose that would be summer of 2000), was a basketball summer. Many summer days found the four of us (Matt, Steve, John, and me) playing basketball in the quiet heat of the afternoon. A bird or two and maybe a car drifted through the neighborhood, but otherwise the stillness was palpable. We played during that dead spot after the lunchtime rattling of plates and before the evening lawnmowers and returns from work. I remember seeing the storm clouds gather and build, forming a dark anvil which rapidly slid under the clear blue above. Still, we continued to play, sensing the tense apprehension in the air that comes before a storm. Suddenly, torrential rains. Deafening thunder. We played on, laughing as the water soaked and refreshed our sweat-coated bodies with a cool summer rain. It was absolutely visceral, that feeling of a communication with nature which was more direct than we thought possible in the pre-packaged wilderness of suburbia. Like all of the best memories, the moment was soon over and we were inside, toweling off and wondering if tomorrow would be drier. When I look back, I will always see us out there, laughing in the rain and enjoying what being young during the summer means.
With a jolt, I find myself lucid again, painfully aware of the now of the moment and its accompanying list of obligations. But I come back to the present as one enriched and refreshed from a long journey; willing to trudge on through the muck to reach another point worth keeping in the files marked “Save, For Always.”