We could, for that hour, talk one 17-year-old to another.
Our voices, the patterns of our speech, the images in our head caught in the amber of youth.
Burnished, deepened, sweetened by fifty years of knowledge–lifetimes rich in what we sought, threaded with compromises and consequences that no assigned novel could ever have taught us. Unsullied by the realities of gray hair, the weight of our years.
Pain, passion, pure endurance, resignation, disbelief, flickers of eternity, death watches, applause, celebratory milestones, hours of repetition, honeyed routines that were beyond our ken then.
Why pick up the phone again, keep the connection?
There aren’t so many with whom we can reach that far back, who understand the template set by that particular place and time,
With whom we shared those coming-to-consciousness moments–the joyful elixirs of stretch and anticipation, competence, confidence when we understood what we could do–the first flushes of prowess as we outreasoned our debate opponents, birthed words and melodies.
There aren’t so many either willing to look at where we are now—on this far side of what we’ve known, survived, and still face–Paris and Padua, flickers of recognition in our own tiny ponds, recordings, a file room full of correspondence, clattering and distracted bars, conclusionless meeting rooms, others’ dreams made manifest.
Or willing to share the questions and the unalterable goodbyes to what lay ahead of us fifty years ago and to what now lies gilded in memory.
So let me live in both worlds for a while yet—stand with one foot in the river of the 60s and one in a creek that slides through today—Einstein’s time—knowing what I couldn’t know then and chancing the opportunity to see all that shimmers across the years, to feel the currents that took us out into the world, to hear our earliest songs sung with today’s rhythms. ©
