Remembering Well.
The lights of the City of Chicago at sunset were perfect this clear spring night. Twinkles on the path forward in a clear red and yellow and orange sky in 360 surround visible from one uncrowded Southwest flight.
I return here, to the home of two of my three far from young ones, for the first time since October of 2023. A visit seems routine now; the space between passes in an eye-blink – one moment I am with leaves all too colorful on the brick stairs in front of my son’s partner’s apartment in Rodgers Park. Another minute, I am in another Airbnb on Sheridan Street searching for a temperature gauge to take the warmth of early summer away from this sleeping space. Much in between in creating solid ground beneath the feet of a business launched far enough ago now for me to have to stop to recall the exact date – a lease signed on 2/22/22. Days fall to weeks fall to months to yet another year. And who knew.
Each visit to Chicago, I contemplate how to freeze time – at least how to remember it well; Today, I settled on a simple revisit with my son to a wonderful late night Thai restaurant on Halstead Avenue. May that made memory be more fixed for having been done again.
Its not lost on me why today I also searched for my childhood home in Brooklyn before departing for Chicago; Images of that three-story residence on Google appeared as I had, through all the passage of time, remembered. My mind’s eye held a picture of my childhood days in that Brooklyn backyard pool - not the other one I have cherished throughout my now thirty years in Connecticut. A long, long time ago.
That Brooklyn home with a backyard pool had a gravel surround that worked to toughen up my bare feet each summer in a way that the grass in my Easton yard could never. I can now say - yes, I was grateful for that time.
I more obviously wondered if any spoken or written language has a word for both the warm of remembrance and the sadness of time’s passage, the recognition too of the few too few trips around the sun. The word is not simple melancholy. It is only sentimentality. It is near to a becoming.
I remembered a quote from Jean Anouilh:
“It takes a very long time to become young.”
Indeed, it does.
At least 60 years for sure.
