Wednesday, April 29

This is a piece I had to write on the topic 'The Way We Were'.  I immediately thought of Barbra Streisand's fabulous song.

As the song says, Memories light the corners of my mind.  I can’t express it better and the truth of it becomes more evident every year.  My generation is living longer than any previous one and we are working for fewer hours each week and for fewer years, so we have the luxury of more time to think, and to reflect on the memories we have accumulated  - those Misty water-coloured memories, softened by the passing of time.

The poet, Roger Robinson, talks about each of us having a ‘portable paradise’ which we carry around with us, concealed, so that no one can steal it.  When life puts us under pressure, he tells us, we should find a quiet place, spread the elements of our paradise out under a lamp and look at them again.

I think of my paradise, my memories, as being like a collection of interesting stones, carefully gathered over time, and lovingly saved.  Every now and again, I take them out, polish them and think of the way we were.

Scattered pictures, in albums, in drawers, in boxes, in photo-frames, sepia-tinted on the wall, in mobile phones and i-pads … in yellow Kodak envelopes and envelopes covered with foreign stamps, precious slides from our honeymoon, carefully stored in a grey box.

It’s good to look again at the smiles we left behind, and relish, once again, the smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.

Can it be that it was all so simple then?  It’s reassuring to think that life was simpler back then, but life is always more complex than we remember.  Our memories prefer to dwell on the better times.  They set aside the worries we had about paying the electricity bill in Winter, 1972, and focus on the pleasures of that summer weekend on the East Coast.  And, isn’t that a good thing?

Or has time rewritten every line?  Yes, some of the lines have been re-written.  We re-write our lives constantly, consciously and unconsciously.  But maybe the most significant lines are the ones which have been etched on our faces and on the backs of our hands, every line representing a memory.

If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?                                                                      Oh, yes, in a heartbeat.

Could we?                                                   But that’s a much more difficult question.