Circles and Cycles

(originally published via Facebook on August 30, 2010)

This weekend I was acutely aware of the passage of time. Friday marked the twentieth anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s death, and as I stared at my idle and dusty guitars it occurred to me that I have now accumulated an impressive and ever-expanding collection of memories that are more than twenty years old. The thought endured Saturday morning as I moved and stacked firewood for the coming winter, and I could tell the weather now has the slightest chill to it, and the local trees are starting to show hints of fall color. I have very distinct childhood memories of going to the Sierra Nevada foothills every fall and clearing brush for firewood, watching my father and uncle wield chainsaws like paintbrushes, nimbly limbing and sectioning the fallen timber into fireplace-sized logs, and scribing a large “X” on the end of each log to help in splitting after the wood had seasoned. My father passed away more than twelve years ago, and I can’t as much as look at a firelog or a woodpile without thinking of him.

Saturday night we stopped by the J&M Café and Cardroom for dinner on our way to the Sounders soccer game. The J&M was the first bar I ever visited in Seattle, another event now separated from the present by more than twenty years. For many years the J&M was a regular stop on our Pioneer Square social circuit, but I don’t think I’ve been there in nearly ten years. Very different now. Walking back through Pioneer Square after the game, we were dismayed at the number of stores and clubs that were closed or had turned over, and were further saddened that in some cases we couldn’t recall exactly what had been there before.

Sunday night we had a woman that Jess knew professionally and her husband over for drinks and appetizers on the boat. The sun is setting earlier and earlier now, and we had to don sweaters and fleeces before long. From among the glasses of wine and stories of travel and sailing it emerged that not only did she know the place where I spent most of my teenage years, she had actually attended our cross-county rival school and graduated the same year, and that at some point in time nearly thirty years ago, she and I stood on opposite of sides of the same high school football field in a small town in Northern California, a world away from our lives now.

I certainly believe that you can go home again, that the past is a worn and comfortable mantle made all the more endearing by its threadbare complexion, but there is danger in looking back too often or lingering too long. I suppose the trick is to give the past its rightful due, but also to accept the here and now, conscious that the current moment holds the next twenty years of memories.