Picking up where we left off
Matt and I are in Portland this month for the first time since January 2020. In toddler years, that’s about a decade—our kids have changed so much, the littlest one most of all, having dropped into this mortal realm from the far side of the Void or wherever. So I wasn’t sure how things would go. Would our son freak out at the sight of his paternal grandparents in person, and refuse to interact with them without the mediation of a screen?
Turns out no. He loves them. Mom and Dad are old news; he wants Grandma to read books to him. She does a better job getting him dressed than we do. She has introduced him to the joys of playing outside with the hose.
It’s been so easy spending time with Grandma and Grandpa again that it hardly feels like we were ever separated. There hasn’t been any of the social awkwardness that I experienced this spring, when we had that outdoor sip-and-see and suddenly found ourselves at a social gathering again. What I’ve felt instead is sadness over the family time we missed. We didn’t just miss “hanging out in Portland with the family,” we missed every specific thing that we’re enjoying now. Conversations at the table. Meals together. Playing outside in the hose. The more fun we have out here the more I am reminded of fun we didn’t have last year.
Matt has a rule about not looking back. The pillar of salt rule. The past will come back to hurt you all the time, and you can’t control it. That’s just what the past does. So don’t take a detour to go toward it. Don’t search it for the one mistake that led to the bad mood that you’re in right now.
I could put some links here with some facts about why looking back is bad for you, why we have to let it go, be present, but we all already know that. The past does not exist. It’s gone. All we have are its consequences.
So here I am. Enjoying the good times. Being so happy that it makes me sad.
Read, read, read
Every novel is a detour to the past. Even ones set in the future—the farther ahead they seem to go the more they’re just the Middle Ages. I’m thinking especially about Jim Crace and his book The Pesthouse, set in North America in what must be at least five hundred years from now, after an unspecified apocalypse that is itself a distant memory, where the people who live in what was once the United States have mixed the Founding Fathers up with Jesus. Every once in a while, someone digs a penny up and sees the person on that coin and thinks he’s coming back someday to save them. It’s the most beautiful book about desperation you can ask for.
If you don’t agree with my every-book-about-the-future-is-about-the-past hypothesis you might point to William Gibson, whose books, set in the near future, are not just futuristic but verifiably prescient. Gibson invented the word “cyberspace.” But his life story is one of moving from the future to the past, and of witnessing firsthand how much the future and the past can both exist at the same time: As a child, after his father’s death, Gibson moved from a modern suburb in North Carolina to a town in Appalachia where people farmed with mules. “I’m convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction,” Gibson has written—this is from his profile in the New Yorker.
I realize that I’m making excuses here for taking as many detour as I do.
Portland is a good place for looking at fish.
I have more to say, but I’m exhausted. So much family time not only has me happy, but exhausted. So, until next Thursday—which will actually be Thursday!