A Jug and a Donkey

(Tuesday) Awake early, I meditate a little but mostly sit here on the couch in the half-light, thinking. J. spent a restless night; we're both concerned about a friend who just received a distressing diagnosis.This friend is strong, surrounded by caring friends; we'll all do whatever we can. And yet the emptiness opens out, ahead of her, ahead of me, and I realize once again how alone each of us is.

This room contains remainders of so many lives: my mother's desk, my grandfather's sleigh bells, the tambourine inlaid with camel bone that my father-in-law bought in Cairo, a plate my mother-in-law bought on Rhodes, flute music I practiced in high school. Remainders after relinquishment of so much else: these are the things we felt we had to keep. And what of this is necessary, really? Not much, even the wall of books behind me or the stack of CDs, most of which exist now inside this machine on which I'm typing. Sentiment and familiarity, and a need for beauty, but even these could go, will go someday, along with us. Meanwhile, on the mantle there's an Italian handpainted jug that was my mother's; I know she bought it when she was young and always liked it, and after she died I brought it back here because it reminded me of the exuberance and delight she had inside but often kept hidden. On the other side is a little ceramic donkey that was my father-in-law's; he's carrying four water-jugs on his back, a memory in miniature of the Damascus water-sellers of his own youth.

On the floor there's also a baby's car seat. In a few days, at midnight, we'll be driving to the airport to pick up two friends who are coming back from China with their newly-adopted eight-month-old daughter. I think of the life stretching ahead of her, eighty or ninety or a hundred years into the future, and the lives stretching behind me, back to my father-in-law's Damascus of 1918, and the hill farm where my grandmother was born in 1900. It's like stretching my arms out in both directions, as far as they'll reach, with me in the middle. And after I'm gone, someone will look at a painting of mine or even one of these objects, which they'll probably remember as ours rather than someone else's, and it will form one of those distant edges rather than the center. Because we remember stories, don't we? No matter how much history we read or how far technology can take us into the future, we place ourselves in time - at least I suspect we do - the way people always have, through remembered snips of things we were told, illustrated by photographs, that have become our own personal myth. It's far, the distance between us and this baby! We're certainly old enough to be her grandparents. And today we'll become a small part of her own myth, to be retold when she is an old woman, somewhere near the year 2100: "It was a day in February when I arrived in Canada in the middle of the night, and friends I remember from my childhood picked us up at the airport..."

It used to distress me to think this way, about how we're here for a little spell and then replaced by the young. Growing up in an agrarian and fairly static society, where the generations overlapped widely, possessions accumulated, and memories seemed long, I also didn't see immigration, relinquishment, dislocation and change as a potential overlay on the progress of time to which everyone is subject. Funny, though, how as I've gotten older these notions have become normal, even comforting, to the point where I can view my own life as a tableau on a mantelpiece, pleasing enough for a while -- and then a hand reaches out, the jug is exchanged for a glass vase or a candlestick, a bird flies in and settles down, and the donkey just walks off and disappears.

Comments

[maria]

I am reading your post in the early dusk of a rainy afternoon, and it brings such beautiful light, from the heart, illuminating the deep ties we weave even as our worlds seem to be unraveling.

[Kim]

Lovely, Beth. Your mind weaves words into a bittersweet yet somehow transcendent whole. I love the idea you expressed here.

[Marja-Leena]

Beautiful, eloquent wise words, Beth. I've had some thoughts like these now what we're the elders in our family, seeing grandchildren growing and ourselves aging. I'm sounding like my mother telling family stories...

[Mouse]

You so often express the sentiments that lie hidden in my heart

[Jean]

I'm just amazed and moved by the picture, which holds every nuance of your words. Sending you hugs and fellow-feeling. Being able to make beautiful shapes and patterns out of the hardest feelings is important, and does help - others, as well as, I hope, yourself.

[Jan]

Hmmmm...these are the golden moments, the wisdom that should come to everyone. Beautifully written, Beth.

[Anil]

Beautiful. Sensitive. Made me reflect much.

We enter so we may one day leave. We draw strength from the belief that we'll be remembered after we're gone, drawing comfort from the possibility that we'll live on in another's memories of us. It is such continuity that enables humanity to survive the vagaries of physical uncertainty.

Now, with the blog, there's hope still that in the ether somewhere someone will search their way to us without seeking us, and will hopefully stay on for the stories we had to tell.

[Uma Gowrishankar]

Beth, thoughts so beautifully expressed - how we are a fragment in this large continuum of existence.

[Peter]

I love the sense of continuity I feel in your writings about your and your husband's families. It reminds me that we are, indeed, holding hands with previous and subsequent generations. There's a lot to think about here. Thanks, Beth.