"Mirrors" by The New Frontiers, Sunday, October 23, 2022 (reworked repost)
TURNED 22 WHEN YOU WERE FOUND. Today's song brings me back to my childhood when the constant cycle of snow, salting, melting, and spring flooding, made driving a new car in Chenango County pointless. So everyone drove old GM-affiliated rust buckets that broke down in the winter, stranding you in the snow. It was only a matter of time that the 1970s Chevy would die and you'd have to fork out money to buy a 1980s Buick or Oldsmobile. When you got into the car and drove the roads in Chenango County, you'd be driving for a while between farms and fields and forests until you descended the hill into town--Oxford or Norwich, right or left. My first home was off the highway before my family moved deeper into the hills, where the "family commune" was located, where so many of my aunts and uncles lived. The first home was much better than the second, at least in my memory. When my family moved to my aunt's old trailer, I was sick every winter, which, in New York was practically six months out of the year. But reflections in my memory of the cabin--pristinely kept, glazed wood, neat and tidy interior--probably never was as pristine as my memory. My parents insisted that the dilapidated shack they saw from the road was, in fact, just as my parents remembered it. The colors much paler, the roof much less stable, the porch much more rotten. "I never let the lawn get this bad, though," my father assured him. "I wonder who Uncle Nathan has living there now." "Do you think we can ask him to go inside?" I reverted to my boyhood, pleading with my parents like when he asked them to stop at the ice cream shop in town. "No,"my dad said taking my old cap off and scratching my head. "I don't think that will be possible. Uncle Nathan hasn't gotten along with our family for years. Him and your grandfather got into a big argument at the family reunion last year. But there's always an argument. That's why we had to move away in the first place."
WE ARE ALL MIRRORS IN DISGUISE. Last October, after I wrote about "Mirrors" and spent a lot of time thinking about my childhood in an attempt to get in touch with my writing style, I saw a message on Facebook from my dad that the house I lived in from birth to five had burned down. He sent pictures:
The first picture is me about three years old in front of the cabin and the second is the morning after the fire. I don't think anyone was hurt, but it's still sad to me. I fantasized about being able to go back into the house. Of course, I don't want to be one of those "we used to live here" people, but somehow I wanted to walk the floors that I could hardly remember. Today I finished watching the final episodes of This Is Us. Without spoiling the sad wrap up, I thought that Jack's (played by Milo Ventimiglia) words to his children when his sons started to shave summed up the theme of my blog: "When you're young, you're always trying to be older. Then when you get old, you're always trying to go back." But we can never go back. We can't go home, not really. Even if everyone is alive and even if your family has never moved, everyone is not the same. So in this nostalgic season--the fall as it gets colder, we stay inside more, the evenings get longer--let's remember to enjoy today and capture it because it will be gone soon.
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