A week ago, I packed up 62 pounds of books in two boxes and shipped them off to Singapore. Thanks to half.com and Amazon, I’ve already sold many of the books we’ve bought this year to readers all over the United States. One book by St. Augustine went to someone at the Harvard School of Design. One book by Peter Drucker just went off a few days ago to Santa Clara, just up the coast from here. Other books have gone to Indiana, Florida, Connecticut and Missouri. These books – which we’ve mostly enjoyed, though some went barely touched – now lie scattered all over a vast continent. I like to think that they bear a whisper of an imprint of their time with us here in Claremont. Perhaps, as they go to their new owners, they contain, in their pages, the weight of the accumulated memories that they inspired in us and in all their previous owners.
In a course I’m doing now on the contemporary family, we’ve struggled with coming up with a working definition of what a family is today. I think one writer encapsulated it best when she described a family as a “community of memories”. We are memory-making creatures. Through our encounters and experiences, tactile or otherwise, we create memories that sustain, challenge, nourish, warn or inspire us. Our heads are not the only repository of such memories, for families, through their stories, photo albums and blogs, also serve as a way to allow memory to become a living part of daily life.
We will leave Claremont in about three weeks’ time, full of memories of a year rich in learning and experiences and growth. Growth has come because we have placed ourselves, deliberately, in new territory, untested ground, and found that we could still stand, even if a little unsteadily. I think we all need to find new ground and to test our footing every once in a while, if only to remind ourselves that we need to change as the world changes, as the people around us change. Plants grow and put deeper roots into the ground. Tomatoes and lemons ripen. Roses bloom in abundant profusion. But the plants adapt too. As the dense heat of summer approaches, our avocado tree has begun to shed its leaves; every breeze scatters a new shower of leaves green and brown, blanketing our lawn, reminding me that even in the full life of summer, some living things will fade away and die.
The snow has also disappeared from the lofty, austere mountains overshadowing our little town. The ski resort at Big Bear just closed two weeks ago, after a blistering spring weekend that made me want to jump into the fountain at Claremont-McKenna College’s central lawn. Final exams and papers approach. Packing to return home has become a reality, not a theoretical exercise. We’ve begun to throw away, or sell, or give away, many things that have become a part of our life here. Our futon, which took my father-in-law and I two hours to assemble, went off a few weeks ago. Clothes, books, toys, furniture – the detritus of our lives – have now taken on a strangely transitory sheen. Are they really here? Will they still be here when we return home to our little green house in Claremont the next time we go out?
Soon, even this little green house will fade away. Our memories will consist of our first live Christmas tree, our first fireplace, setting off the smoke alarms early in the morning, mowing the lawn – and living in a house that’s older than the independent history of most post-colonial countries, including Singapore. But our family will remain intact. This community of memories – my wife, my children – will continue to sustain me as we begin a new life.
For it is a new life that we return to. T S Eliot has said in over-quoted lines that we return to the place of our beginning with new eyes. He was partly right and partly wrong. New eyes teach us to see new things, to apprehend faces and colours and the shimmer over the water’s edge that we didn’t see before. But I think we return with more than just fresh eyes. We return home with old bodies and old memories chastened by the experience of testing new, uncertain ground, and knowing that we need to keep finding uncertain ground in order to grow, to live, to breathe. Or else the old ground hardens into glue, and we find that our feet can no longer move, and we remain, content, to become a pillar of salt molecule by molecule.
We need to walk on water every now and then, and discover, to our infinite surprise, that the water can hold us up as we begin to grasp the patterns of new life, new ways of living, new ways of thinking and creating and tumbling off into the tumult of old and new relationships.
And even if we sink, even if the ground beneath us gives way, we learn. We can survive and build again. And we will know how to walk better, to build better, the next time.
We tried it on for size while still in the shop and I couldn't get it off after that. I had to put her on the cashier counter for the man to scan the price tag. She would only deign to take it off when she wanted to be unencumbered while playing with J's buy, a Disney racer track.
