Contrail Over The Creek in anticlimatic

I keep time slipping during walks around the river and neighborhood.
Something about the exercise and the scent of local spring flora and the calm undistracted stillness of mind.
It lets in distant things.

It’s interesting how eras in lore do not much match the eras in memory. If one thinks of the 80s, all that comes to mind are the trends of young people- teenagers, and to an extent young adults with kids- but that’s only half of the world at that time. It’s the older, lingering generations that shape the true atmosphere of an era. They’re the ones who own just about everything, having accumulated a lifetime’s worth of things and places and kept them furnished to maintained to their liking and standards. That’s why, when the era passes, the people remain- but everything is different. You might think the people changed, but they didn’t. The actual atmosphere of the era never really matched the trends of the lore.

When I get flashes from the 1980s, it’s always the older people I feel. The houses from the 1940s with sheets of icicles in the winter and clothes hanging on the line in the back or side yard in the summer. Railings of black iron pipe sticking out of concrete steps. Gaudy colorful decorations from the 1950s. Dusty. Commercials, gay and carefree, in the background. Smell of old cigarette oil on wet cardboard.

…

It’s important to feel things deeply, I think. It can be difficult, because depth in that regard both invites and requires pain. Grief. Disappointment. Existential terror, even. But, it is a price worthy of the heights of love and empathy and gratitude that come packaged.

In fact, encouraging individuals to do the hard thing and feel things, many things, on a substantially deep level, might breed the kind of genuine compassion and empathy we all seem to need right now as a bitter and divided people.

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Last updated April 13, 2024