March 17, 2006

• Retreat! Retreat!

  Yes, I’m going back. I’m regressing and retreating.  In four hours, I leave to be a speaker and chaperone at the church’s high school youth retreat.  I’m quite looking forward to it.  I really enjoy working with teens and hanging out with teens.  I like playing board games and basketball until the wee hours of the morning. I like the van to vibrate with the bass from a hip hop tune. I like the fact that they worry about history tests and physics and algebra instead of mortgage payments and discipline issues and graying hair.

  I wrote something two years ago, and I thought I’d post it here.  I forgot all about it, but I was trying to find a quote by Sandra Cisneros written in her short story “Eleven.”  I found this unfinished piece instead, and I wondered what other think of these ideas.

  “I was cruising down the darkened highway tonight, my husband
  and children asleep in the car, listening to Retro Saturday Night on a local
  radio station. As my toe tapped and I sang along to “Safety Dance” and “View to
  a Kill,” it struck me: some of these songs are twenty years old! Twenty years?
  How can a song I remember from my high school days be twenty years old? Isn’t
  twenty years almost all of my lifetime?

  Rationally speaking, I know my age.
  I know I’ve been out of high school for seventeen  years. I know that I’ve been
  married for thirteen years and that I am the mother of five children.
  Emotionally speaking, however, I’m not sure where I stand. Sandra Cisneros was
  right. What they don’t understand about birthdays and what
  they never tell you is that when you’re thirty-four, you’re also thirty, and
  twenty-five, and twenty-one, and eighteen, and sixteen, and thirteen, and
  ten.  How can I understand who I am and
  who I am supposed to be when there is so much of me that happened in the past?

  A
  few years ago, a widow in her late fifties confided to me about an encounter she
  had with a widowed gentleman. With the wide-eyed look of a teenager
  experiencing her first crush, she said, “He hugged me, and when he did, it was
  like electricity went all through me.” I stood there, thoughts whirling. “Electricity?
  Hugging?  You are in your late fifties,
  for heaven’s sake!” I thought. “Shouldn’t you be thinking of other
  things?”  My thoughts then turned to my
  grandmother, an avid reader of romance novels. “Could it be,” I mused, “that my
  seventy-something year old grandmother thinks and feels the same things I do
  when reading such novels?” The thought was startling and disturbing.

  What
  did all of this mean? Will the same passions, fears, and dreams I have now
  still be the things I yearn for and treasure when my life ends? Is there no
  magic age when the past goes away, like the shutting of a scrapbook, only to be
  pondered when prudent? I used to think so. Perhaps, better phrasing would be
  that I didn’t use to think at all about such matters.  I was concerned with the next thing: getting
  my driver’s license, graduating from high school, starting college, finding a
  boyfriend, graduating from college, getting married, having a baby, buying a
  house. And now when I think about it, there is frustration. There is no going
  back.”

  So, there you go.  Heavy thoughts for a Friday afternoon. 
  

  • 1:07 pm
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