A myriad of possible posts have floated through my food-distracted-brain over the Thanksgiving weekend, none of which seemed to materialize here as my family time was much more important. So, I guess it’s that family time that becomes the post that is eventually written.
This Thanksgiving was spent with my parents. I hadn’t seen them in about a year, so Mom, as predicted, produced a banquet worthy of royalty for just the four of us. As Karen and I were married while in grad school, not everything from our previous lives as singles made it from the places we moved from to attend grad school. My parents have been holding a great deal of stuff, and we clear a little more of it out each time we visit. This time around, though, Karen became involved in the memorabilia from my very early life.
I’ve always had this problem with the past. I prefer not to dwell on it. I think that part of the reason is that I tend to be extremely hard on myself for the mistakes made, and permit them to obscure the wonderful, formative memories that abound from those years. My wife loves the past: she thrives when delving into old library collections, journals, and history. This trip was her venture into my childhood as she and my mother bonded anew while perusing photo albums I had long since forgotten about. Everything from my middle- and high-school music “careers,” to super hero costumes worn for Halloween, to fiction born late in high school. Her discoveries were punctuated by my occasional irritability that trickled down from feeling at times overwhelmed by the past (a feeling I’m not used to), and at times violated as certain memories were discussed that I preferred not to discuss. That irritability tended to move into a speechless bemusement as great memories re-entered the picture for me.
Everyone has skeletons, and I’ve always preferred mine stay tucked safely away in the closet of my past. The problem is, I discovered this weekend, that I have a lot of wonderful things in that same proverbial closet, things which I have allowed to stay boxed up and gathering dust in order to maintain the secrecy of a few little skeletons that don’t seem that big after all when exposed to some daylight.
When we got up yesterday to prepare for our trip home, we read Psalm 136. The mistakes I’ve made at various points in my life seemed very subdued, and replaced (or perhaps redeemed?) by the realization that I had a wonderful childhood.
I’ve had an amazing past.
Now, my today is so much better informed. Perhaps, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, a sense of holism has made its way into me. In either case, I made a lot of peace this weekend. And the amazing past revealed in old photos and on old pages this weekend propels me into a much more possible future.