the future is yesterday

*I have returned from Boston. Several posts regarding the trip should be made.*

I have recently read something in Francis Schaeffer that had never occurred to me before (an experience that I had previously been accustomed to). Particularly strange about this reading was that I simultaneously experienced the novelty of the concept and its reality. He wrote in “Genesis in Space and Time” about the significance of man and the meaning of history for man:

“Many events happened before we were born and many others that we cannot remember occurred in our early life. If we are to know about them, our parents or others must tell us. A multitude of things which occurred before my time and are personally important to me I must learn from others. History is involved – things which really happened but which I must be told by another. It is exactly the same with the whole human race. . . . So, just as a child needs to be told something of his personal history, mankind needs to be told about its history. Unless we are told about our beginnings, which secular study cannot trace, we cannot make sense of our present history.”

I know few people who have been through what I am about to describe, and I think that is due in part to the fact that most of my friends are from the south. The reason this makes a difference is because they have lived among their own family for most of their lives (and that to their credit!). For most of my life I have been geographically close only to my immediate family.

Once a year, we used to visit my mother’s parents in Massachusetts, which always happened to be far enough away from where we lived to be a real vacation spot to us kids. My family has done this since before I could make memories. However, in recent years, my higher education and financial needs have kept me from making the pilgrimage. A few months ago an opportunity came into my life. It has taken me here.

I write this entry in Westwood, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where I have traveled to audition at two prestigious music schools in hopes of gaining entrance to a graduate-level program and much bigger Federal loans. I have also traveled here to see my grandparents again, whom I haven’t seen for years.

After arriving at the airport and shuttling out to the suburbs to be received by the warm company of my grandmother (henceforth tenderly referred to as”gramma”) and my Auntie Pammy and Uncle Don (surprise guests), I was driven to a house which I instantly recognized, though I may have been thirteen years old the last time I saw it.

This house is the one that has been inhabited by my gramma and grampa for over forty years, and it has changed very little since last I was here. (The writer is aware of the changing of tense here.) From the moment I entered I was overwhelmed with details and I remembered things heretofore lost to my recollection. The whole house smelled the same, even down to the freshness of the smell of the bedsheets. The furniture remained almost entirely in the old arrangement. Everything looked just as I remembered (with the notable exception that I remembered it all being larger), but somehow I soon felt like I was in a waking dream. All of these things were so real that I nearly began to disbelieve them. I saw a place where I recalled that a small metal pencil sharpener in the shape of a sewing machine had been; having mentioned its absence, my astonished gramma produced the very same from a drawer underneath. Even the little “mouse house” I had played with when I was eight or so was still in this bedroom, here – in fact, I’m looking at it – in all its detail, miraculous in its corner though artistically (and perhaps aesthetically) unimpressive. For some reason I didn’t think (or want to think?) that it could all be true; it was connecting me subconsciously with a part of myself and my life that I had almost totally forgotten. The miracle wasn’t in the artifacts, the relics of childhood. It was everything around them. Something felt rather than something seen directly.

All these things passed across my mind, and I doubt not they passed across my face in some fashion. My relatives probably found me dull company at first due to my lack of ability or desire to speak. When the aunt and uncle left, I realized that this would be quite possibly the first time in my life when gramma and I were alone. I couldn’t help but wonder then about all the things she must know, all the life she has lived; all the things I would want to ask her that (inevitably) she would not be available to answer. For lack of organized thought, I simply asked her to tell me about her life and her family. Anything she remembered.

I have had classes in Medieval Europe, the British Reformation, the History of Philosophy, World Civilizations and Biblical history. As gramma revealed these details from her remembrance, things about my mother, stuff and stories which I’m sure she thought banal and rather dull, I felt like I was learning more than any professor had given me. I couldn’t believe some of the things that I never would have considered to be a part of her. It was like finally learning the reasons for the intimacy shared with another, long after that closeness was firmly established. This history lived; it taught me intimately about myself and related me to a larger picture, a frame in which all of us are attempting to belong. Her life became larger than her words and occasionally faltering memory. It became much smaller then, acknowledging that its course is nearly run; and much greater, in that she remains joyful about it in its somewhat disguised fullness. She glorifies God in his work throughout her span and says she would not change it for anything.

Today, the two of us went to Boston to look around. Let the reader here understand that I know next to nothing about Boston and gramma knows a little more. There we were, the pair of us; my seventy-year-old gramma walking me to places she wanted me to see. At once it seemed unique, as though I was watching the two of us from somewhere else, and staggeringly normal, as though the two of us did nothing else with our time.

We have returned now, and as I mentioned, I write from a bedroom here in her house. When I finish this entry I will be going to sleep, and tomorrow something strange will happen. I must face a new juxtaposition: the overwhelming experience that has essentially caused me to revert to a ten-year-old and a challenge placed before me that means everything (as far as my small conceptions and dreams are concerned) to my future. Reflecting on it tonight, perhaps the things that mean the most to my future have already occurred.