Oh, Mother Gibbs, I never realized before how troubled and how... how in the dark live persons are. Look at him. I loved him so. From morning till night, that's all they are--troubled. Emily in Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Some friends were down here from northern Virginia last week staying at Folly Beach. We go back a long way to 1973 in Columbia. They were staying at the beach for the week, and so I had a chance to visit and catch up with their lives and to reminisce. I tend to do that around S....
She lived with my aunt for a number of years while she was teaching in South Carolina, and so she was like family. That was back in the early and mid-70s, as I alluded to, and of course the passage of 34 years seems almost impossible to comprehend. She has two children in college and so i got to see how much they have been changing and growing up.
Around the dinner table I talked about my first job in Columbia working in shipping and receiving part time at a department store while I took courses at the university. I recalled the old boarding house where I rented a room in a leafy old neighborhood. (Aside.. I am listening to Over the Rainbow played on the piano by Art Tatum.. the song that I have been thinking about is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John which was constantly playing on the radio back in the fall of 1973. I love life's little "coincidences.")
We had a nice visit, but i often feel vaguely unsettled and awkward in such situations. It is difficult for me to socialize although I am an outgoing person when the sitauation requires it. I am so seldom around people other than at work that when i get around a large group for dinner I tend to try to be too talkative and entertaining just to keep from being silent and awkward.
I seem to be most content when I am walking the trails at the park and nature preserve or sitting by myself at the beach listening to the waves and thinking deeply or about nothing at all. Before I went to have supper one night with S... and her family, I stood out on the beach with a rush of wind blowing through my hair, wishing I could just stay where I was and not have to be convivial and talkative.
After I left their beach house, I drove downtown to the pier and walked into the ocean on that long pier, taking in all the sounds of the vacationers strolling along, talking, listening to the ocean, observing people fishing and just enjoying themselves on a carefree summer night.
I was there on the pier only a few minutes and then left for home, stopping first at my mother's where another ghost from the past popped up on TV -- a documentary about the main character George Gibbs in Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town. What memories that brought back. Not ony have I seen it in various adaptations on TV over the years, but in high school our whole school was bussed to the Reportory Theater in downtown New Orleans for a presentation of that play, one of the first I had ever seen in a live performance.
My whole day was like that.. a series of moments that sent me back to the past time and again, whether reminiscing with old friends or walking on the Folly Pier, thinking about summer vacations there as a kid in the 1960s when life really did "seem" more carefree for a short while, although for me i know it wasn't. Life has never been carefree, never free of worry and anxiety, although that anxiety and angst resided mostly right below the surface as i tried to live as engaged with life and people as i could be.
I often see my life in little incidents, good and bad times, passing before me in my mind's eye. I wince at sudden, painful memories, I smile as I think about some of the funny times and people I have known. But isn't it strange how the bad times seem to come back to us almost with a punishing delight on the part of our memory? I don't think we can ever put those parts of our past behind us.. We just live with them.
