The past weekend a whirlwind for me. I flew out of Houston Thursday after my last class and was picked up by Dave in Wichita. At 6 AM Friday, Dave, Sally, Scott, and me drove from Kansas to York, Nebraska for Dave's induction into the York College Hall Of Fame. It was a wonderful affair followed by golf, a York High football game, family gatherings, etc. in the thirty hours in our hometown. We drove around to see our schools and the houses we lived in and the places we played ball. We drove through the cemetery where some of my childhood friends are buried and reminisced about what happened here and there. And then we drove back to Kansas and I flew back to Houston.... and I seamlessly moved into the routine I've followed for decades.
I'm not positive but I think this was only my fifth time in York since 1977. Our folks moved to Texas in 1976 and we had no relatives left behind. I returned to coach American Legion baseball one more summer after they relocated but then I drifted away as I began my teaching and coaching career. As I walked through the crowd at the ball game, I searched for familiar faces but came up empty. (We were asked to sign a petition to recall the mayor!) A few were vaguely familiar but not close enough to risk embarrassment should I be wrong. Dave and I commented that except for some new bleachers and scoreboards, the scene as York thumped Crete had not changed any since we were boys running around those same Friday night contests. What I did find disconcerting was how time had shrunk the places etched in my memories. Maybe it's because I've lived for two decades in one of the biggest US cities or maybe it's just the way I want to remember. I walked into the gym in the York Community Center where I probably played more indoors than in any other facility. I asked Dave, at least semi-seriously, if they had moved the walls in. It was so small stacked up next to my mental picture. It was almost as if time had played a trick on me. Maybe I just played a trick on myself.
Time to me is incomprehensible. I just don't get it but maybe I'm not really supposed to. We can't see it but we can see what it does. It ages us and the things we build although nature seems immune. I was pleasantly surprised that all the many trees that line the streets of York seem to have grown and provide much more shade than I remember! Moses in Psalm 90:4 writes that time and God have a relationship we can never quite wrap our collective heads around.
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
It's like our Father blinked and decades have passed. The reality is that I blinked and blinked and blinked and have distorted what I once knew first hand. It's been said that truth and memory are related but not identical. Thomas Wolfe famously authored You Can't Go Home Again about a man and his hometown's reaction when he wrote about it. I disagree; I believe you can go home again and should go home again. You just have take into account the millions of blinks since childhood. And that I have changed. Thank goodness for the dreams awakened in a little boy's heart on the plains of the Cornhusker State. Those can survive the visual blurring of inanimate objects and the romanticizing of youth. I can live with that.
Applicable quote of the day:
As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.
Stephanie Coontz
God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com
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