A Pilgrim’s Digression

All day, I am reminded of it. As I dressed this morning, I listened to WMAL on the AM radio, and every five or ten minutes I heard the date: “And here’s the news for Tuesday October 16, 2007.” And later, “And here’s your weather for Tuesday October 16, 2007.”

It’s going to be partly cloudy today in Washington, by the way. High near 78 degrees.

When I arrived at work, I checked my messages. “New message, on, Tuesday, October 16, 2007…” the woman’s pre-recorded voice said in the halting, punctuated syntax of machines.

My wife called me at work to say good morning, and she mentioned the date, as well. What day is it? Well, they say it’s my birthday.

I feel pretty good about it. It’s not as big a deal as past birthdays, though I still feel unbearably old, sometimes. I was listening to a Bruce Springsteen interview on 60 Minutes, the other evening, and something Springsteen said really struck me. The interviewer asked him about the breakup of the E Street band in the nineteen-eighties. Springsteen replied sagely, “We all have stories we’re living and telling ourselves. And there’s a time when that narrative has to be broken because you’ve run out of freedom in it. You’ve run out of places to go.” This is the way he justified not just a career move, but what his friends in the band saw as an abandonment of them.

What I found truly wise about that statement was the understated idea that we create the narrative of our lives. That’s a rather more pro-active, less fatalistic, view of human life than I am used to professing.  Yet there is truth in it.  In some ways, creating a narrative of who I am and why I am is exactly what I’ve been doing for all these years, and the narrative has always been a sad one–maybe not even an honest narrative, which I have nonetheless believed (to my detriment).

I have expressed the desire to break that narrative in one way or another here–either through my stated intention of never writing seriously again, or my intention of removing this blog, or in any number of other ways. Hearing that Springsteen comment solidified the idea in my mind that if we do indeed create a narrative in which we live, perhaps we can revise the narrative, too. One cannot change the past; one can change one’s interpretation of it.

Oddly, just as I have been thinking about making a quietus of the past, I have been dreaming of my early childhood in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Now more than 20 years in the past, that stage of my life comes back vividly to me at night. There is nothing lurid or surreal about these dreams, except the incredible detail of the dream. In my dream, I am walking through the house of my then-best friend, Mac. I am an adult, but the house is the same as it was then, in the early eighties. There is green shag carpet; a counter in the kitchen with brown vinyl covered bar stools; a large console TV on the floor with an Atari 2600 on top of it; dark, wood paneling on the walls. Mac’s dog Chewie (named after Chewbacca of course) runs out to greet me, a large, brown, wooly mutt that jumps on me and licks me in the face. But other than Chewie there is no one home. I wander this empty house– not even my own childhood house–looking into all the rooms and taking in the richness of detail in which my memory has recreated this place in a dream. The depth of detail is amazing, to the point that I look into Mac’s bedroom closet and see many of the toys he and I played with during the summer afternoons we spent together. The records on his stereo rack are the ones I remember listening to with him as a boy: David Bowie, the Police, Weird Al Yankovic.

It’s all there. So many years have passed, yet it’s still there. I feel old, today, as might be expected; but in memory, and in dreams, I still feel ten years old.