Two things bring on this entry. Well, not things, thoughts about things bring on this entry. The second I mention first because it popped into my mind only about an hour ago. I live in a condo building that has a laundry facility in the basement. Several people living here have their own, in the apartments, but mine is smaller than some of the others and there simply is no room for a side by side or even a stack. Besides, I don't mind going downstairs. When I was growing up near 175th Street, in the Bronx, there was no basement laundry. You either went to the laundromat, which my mother sometimes did, or you washed things by hand and brought it all up to the roof to hang on the lines to be dried by the sun. When we moved to another building near the Fort Independence part of the Bronx, we had a basement laundry. I considered that the height of luxury as a sixteen year old. So, in my dotage finding myself back to a basement laundry is not a burden.
Anyway. I was trudging back upstairs with my freshly cleaned laundry and I had a sudden and intense feeling of being back in that second building, and a strong sense of my mother, circa 1970, down in THAT basement, folding the dried clothes and towels and sundries. In fact, for a moment it was as if where I was, here in Los Angeles, and where I once was, more than forty years ago, and 3,000 miles geographical miles away, were identical.
It was a flash. And I was suddenly very sad as I boomeranged to the "present" and was very much aware that my mother had been gone from this earth for decades, and I had lived a whole life of my own with her absent from it.
The first thought has been meandering in and out of my consciousness for about a week, since I got back the urn containing Bleu's (perhaps, I realize, my favorite cat of the many I have had over the years about whom you can read in a previous entry should you be a cat lover, an animal lover as I am) at the beginning of this week. There is room for a 4 by 6 picture. I picked on that represented his essence, and our relationship. It was one taken in about December of last year--Bleu sitting on the kitchen counter, just behind some flowers that had been sent to me, with the faucet running for him to take a drink. It was a favorite activity. Going up there, sometimes just sitting waiting for me to notice; other times, meowing in a demand for immediate service. I even tried once to show him how to turn it on and off himself. Silly girl. He preferred to be served. I look at the picture that adorns a pretty wood box of my Bleu. I look at my counter, exactly as it was when that picture was taken, except for the flowers, and time compresses. Then. Things were nice. Now. Not the same. Not as nice.
Everything around me has changed. There was a time when. . .
I can think of a million things, places, people, animals, things. Once here in time. Now gone, in time?
Or are they just out of time?
I look in the mirror. The same face. But not. Time has taken a toll. But it's not too bad--if I put my make up on with deliberation not in the usual slip shod, "I've gotta get out of here or I'll be late" way.
The things I did in the past, the education, the people who crossed my path, the "career"--all of that which went before today, another time? And, somehow when I look upon it all, it is as if, in light of where I am today, it might well never have happened at all, for all the impact it appears to have made since it all came, and went, as in the blowing of a dandelion by a child. For that child, time is an endless commodity. I was once that child.
How inconsistent I am! Here I claim to be a woman of faith, steeped in the theology of Death and Resurrection, and I find myself looking at time, going forward (past, present and future may all be an illusion say the scientists) as a closed door that I cannot figure out how to open. Actually I always have done so if it comes to that. When I had just gotten out of law school and was looking at the want-ads, and dreaming of moving to California, with an amalgam idea of becoming both a lawyer and a writer, I remember the exact feeling I have now. The future seemed--impossible. I would always be in the Bronx, and not in a place of my own. I had no reason for this thought. It just felt that way. I couldn't see past the probably self-imposed obstacles. For a while, for a very long "time", once I moved, once I settled in, enjoyed the newness of a place so different from that of my formative years, immersed in a field of endeavor, the door seemed to open wide, to a new time, and a concomitant energy that travels with possibility.
Life shifted as it does. I am in a new phase of time? There is much to recommend it, and there have been various tasks and adventures to engage me. But it also seems that God, yes, God, has asked, in His usually Mysterious way, to sacrifice here and there, probably far less than He asks of others with more courage and persistence than I have, but more than I would like, to do His Will. It's hard to discern what He has in Mind. And I have mentioned to Him my feeling of a "closed door" to the future where, for once in my life, I am not worried about something or another, in the "what-ifs" of my mind.
One's psyche is a hard nut to crack. Mine has always been a glass half full with an abundance of catastrophizing added. I would like to be more like a friend of mine, who reads this blog, born, as it happens on the same day as I was, who has already opened the door to her future with joy and has often encouraged me to do the same thing. I did it once; I can do it again. God Willing and the Creek don't rise. Surely, there's enough time. 🕐
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