Sayings of a Would-Be Ancestor
1.
Some animals learn to crawl and fly before they reproduce. Only their children benefit and, then, after
many generations, they forget these skills.
Then the children start to teach their parents how to crawl and
fly. A new generation grows up without
the memory of who they are and where they must go. Many people are the same.
2.
In another world, I would be learning how to write, but before I could
send myself any important messages, I will have passed away. Thus in this life it is not always wise to
imagine something better. In another
world, perhaps someone might imagine what I could have done and write about it.
3.
Whenever someone tells me their personal troubles, I wish it were
possible to help them out. In spite of
sympathy, however, I have no understanding of their plight. If were to try, it would make things
worse. It is better therefore to keep
quiet and nod one’s head wisely.
4.
Every day the newspapers become more and more incomprehensible. Words no longer mean what they once did. Syntax falls apart, pronouns fumble for antecedents,
apostrophes dangle in the wind. Events
are reported that have neither date nor place, and others occur without
contexts. If I could only figure out
what happened, I would write a letter to the editor to complain.
5.
Jorge Luis Borges says that everyone has some piece of memory—a scene,
an event, a person—that will disappear into oblivion after we are gone: a tree
in a park, a fire in a shop, a great man no longer remembered. For me it is parents and neighbours, houses
on the street, games played with friends.
When I am gone, they will all be gone, and no one will know or care.
6.
Costume dramas in film and on television are more accurate than
ever. The clothing, the furniture, the
architecture, and even the landscape.
But they make no sense in terms of dialogue or atmosphere or morality:
all are anachronisms. Once we would have
said that the artistic past was a metaphor for the present. Now it is not even that. So I watch these productions backwards,
focusing on the details of colour and texture and away from the people and
their emotions.
7.
While I was born in 1940, most of the people in my life were products
of the nineteenth century. I must have
seemed very strange to them, as I do again with those to whom the twentieth
century is an impossible olden time.
That which remains real and comfortable are old movies from the 1930s
and 1940s, where even the trees, the mountains and the skies are as they ought
to be.
8.
I used to sit in the corner, a kind of little alcove, where a closet
pinched the room up against a window.
There was an old lumpy chair where I curled up. Out of the window, the best of times, was
winter, late in the afternoon, twilight slowly changing to dark, snow beginning
to fall, a circle of light under the lamp across the street. Everything was quiet, except an occasional
car scrunching through the snow. In that
cone of yellow light happened many mysteries, such as arguments, murders,
kissing strangers, mad women searching for their dogs, old men trying to light
a pipe. In front of me, the closet,
against which I put my feet, leaned a book on my lap, and read the books my
father bought for me, various long, tedious Alcxandre Dumas novels, that
required me to look up words in a dictionary, terms for horses’ caparisons,
knights’ armour, castles’ architecture and armaments. I made long lists and tried to learn
vocabulary. No one ever said to pay
attention to the plot or the characters or the style. Every evening a few pages out of which I
remembered nothing except random words.
My thinking was about the vile deeds out on the street, the grotesque
players in a cheap melodrama played in the yellow cone of light. And in the closet
what was found? A pile of old browned
newspapers. To touch them was to see
them crumble into dust but one could look at then headlines from the late
1880s: such as Brooklyn Bridge Opens.
That was only a little over fifty years earlier and yet seemed like a
completely different era of history.
Then before anyone knew what had happened, I grew up, and hardly spent any
time in my corner den, and eventually forgot all the adventures, mysteries and
murders that had taken place.
9.
Saturdays, Shabbat, were not religious, except in the sense of rituals,
games and group activities. I would go
to Charlie the Barber’s down the street, at the corner of 13th
Avenue. This was a time to read comic
books and get a haircut. Then we would
all go to the movies, usually the New Garden on 46th Street. It had three features, a dozen or so shorts, ,
various newsreels dating back four or five years, a lot of cartoons, and old
serials which were out of order and incomplete.
Naturally it all took five or six hours, during which we ate sandwiches
brought in brown paper bags, bottles of juice, and a few bars of candy. When it was all done, the journey home in
itself was an adventure, involving re-enactments of the main scenes, arguments
about what had actually happened in one or the other of the films, and promises
to try the Normandy Theatre next week because they had Robin Hood movies and a
different range of cartoons. Thus ended our day of rest.
10. Bad things in the long dark quiet
of the night. Once, an impossibly time
ago, someone phones with a nervous cryptic message. We turn on the radio and hear the end of the
second plane crashing into the second Tower in Lower Manhattan, with incoherent
comments on other airliners, crashes, and dying people. We flip on the television. The images make no
sense for many minutes. Then it becomes
comprehensible and I recall that my wife has flown to see family in America two
nights before. The phones won’t make
connections.
11. On another day, more recently, I
email a friend in France to ask his opinion of the Bastille Day attacks in
Nice. He has just woken up after a
lovely summer night. He will contact me
again soon, he says. It takes
hours. Then he sends a brief message to
say his daughters have been on a biking holiday and he needs to find out where
they are. I am still waiting for the
next message.
12. Then another message from an old
friend to tell me her son went to Syria to fight with the Kurds against ISIS.
He was killed by a landmine. He is a hero.
But he was a troubled youth, and his mother is devastated. I am reminded painfully of another woman, a student
in Israel, to tell me her son was blown apart by a roadside bomb. Another hero.
She found it hard to accept, even as she knew he died as he would have
wished, defending his nation, his people, his fellow soldiers. We all want to howl with rage against the
injustice and cruelty of the world.
13. Late in the afternoon a little
hedgehog crawled to the edge of our garden and shivered with pain. We set out some warm milk and soft
bread. He sipped as though he had not
had any liquid for days. Then he slowly
crawled a few metres into the yard. By
then the night covered everything with darkness. In the morning, the body was
curled up. I prodded it. The creature was dead. With a garden spade I lifted him and buried
him lightly in a corner, under the bushes.
Later the sparrows came and finished the milk and bread. Life is like that.
14. The tui sits in the tree at the
front of the house. It has been there
for years. He sings all day. He imitates our doorbell, the sound of the
car door opening and shutting, and the washing machine beeping the completion
of its cycle. I whistle some tunes for
the tui but he only answers in these mechanical sounds. Probably he knows better than I do what is
important.
15. Why do they say school is
boring? For me it was infinitely
interesting. Everyday new games to play,
new facts to learn, new arguments with my friends and teachers.
16. The more I grew, the more I
changed. Time went very slowly, but
every new day was anticipated. The
seasons changed. Rain, snow, wind, sizzling
suns. Only one thing never changed. My parents.
Now they are gone.
17. Though the seasons changed as I
knew they would, in the summer I forgot about the spring that had passed, and
in the autumn about the summer games and journeys into the hills. When winter
arrived, it pushed away the memory of fall.
Then spring came and it had no surprises. I thought it would last forever, as it always
did.
18. No need for smart phones and
aps. No one ever calls, except the
company to tell me it is time to top up my account. Even as a boy, when the world was young and
fresh, I never called anyone and no one phoned me. Sometimes, I was told to say hello to a
relative at the other end. Often it was
someone I knew, but I couldn’t identify their voice, or understand what they
were trying to tell me. Now all grown up
and old, when strangers call I can hang up on them with no remorse.
19. Surely there were as many
generations between the beginning and myself as for anyone else. But looking back, very soon the memories
fade, the names are not attached to stories, and then there is nothing. How soon will that nothing catch up with me?
20. The old men at the clinic were sharing
anecdotes about bypasses, hernias and prostate operations. I could not join in their lively conversation,
even though from what they said I knew I was older than them all.