Chafing at the Passage of Time

I pulled out an old sketchbook the other day. It was a “journal/sketchbook” I used in 1981 on a vacation at my parents beach house out in California and later on at home in Iowa. Reading those entries and looking at the old paintings after so many years have passed was another trip in itself. I was way too serious in my diaries and way too somber. It was as if I didn’t want to write about anything fun – preferring instead to pour out my angst onto the pages. Reading the passages stirs up some painful memories, but I wouldn’t let go of them for the world. The sketches belie a beauty and serenity that was indeed there, serving as a backdrop for the growing pains of revisiting a home and parents that through the passage of years, shifting relationships and physical distance, you have grown away from. Memory is selective. Whether we choose to keep the joy or the pain from the past depends so much on the fickleness of mood and personality. I think optimists underline all the pluses in their past, plucking them out like flowers, while the pessimists are always finding all those weeds.

From November 2, 1981 at home in Iowa - revised
“It’s like my handwriting - it’s terrible because I try to write as fast as the words come into my head. Sometimes I think I’m making the letters sloppy on purpose - to spite myself. I know I can write legibly and even use all the letters required by each word. So why not? What is this heated rush - this sense of urgency that my thoughts are so transient, so fleeting that I must grab them as they fly by. If I don’t tie them down they’ll be gone forever. Time is my enemy - my tormentor. It laughs and sneers, tongue wagging, eluding me, always two steps ahead of me. Always stingy with itself, time is not generous with me. When I knock at time’s door, looking for a donation, it always says it gave at the office.

Once on a visit, while filling the coffeepot, I asked my Mom if she too, got mad that the water didn’t come out of the tap fast enough, YES! , she laughed.