“What we see resonates in the memory of what we have seen; new experience always percolates through the old, leaving a hint of its flavor as it passes. We live, in this sense, in a remembered present” –Adam Zeman
Do you ever have those moments where you are not quite sure where you are? Not literally where you are physically, but where you are in time? Have you ever had those times where time seemed to fold on to itself and you were in the same place but everything was different, as if the life you had been accustomed to just changed with out you knowing? The other day I had one of those moments........
After seeing I missed a call from my mom's old cell phone number, which my little brother uses to call me occasionally I called it back. As I was standing there on the beach, I did not give much thought to how many times the phone had rung, I was on the phone but in that waiting phase where your mind wanders as you wait for an answer. Then all of the sudden the phone went to voice mail...."Hello, you've reached Barbara...." For a brief second I wondered if I had just awoke from really long dream. There on the other end of the phone was my mom's cheery voice mail, the one that always made me laugh because it is so her. By that I mean you can tell she set up her voicemail while doing 10 million other things (as she usually did) and you can sense the happy franticness in her voice. She ends the voice mail with "have a good day, night, ahh whatever time it is" and laughs.
This voicemail made me think of the traces we all leave on life. Here it is nearly 2 and a half years later and my mom's voice is still there. For a few brief seconds I was flooded with tons of happy memories of my mom. Her franticness. Her gentleness. Her cheer. Her overflowing exuberance for life. Just from a simple voicemail. For a few brief seconds there I was standing on the beach wondering if I had imagined it all. We leave traces. We leave moments. It was not just the trace of her on the voicemail that startled me, but the traces of her I see all over the place. Moments that take me back in time. Just prior to that phone call I had been out in the water surfing. As I paddled around in the gorgeous pacific ocean, I thought how did I get here? Not literally here but in this present moment.
For me that present moment was distinctly tied to my mom. As I sat in the crisp pacific water waiting for the next wave I was flooded with memory of my trip to the surf shop way back at the young age of 15 where my mom purchased me my first ever surf board. I remember my mom carrying it out of the shop for me and squeezing it into her car. I remember the first time we took a trip to the ocean with the new board and how excited she was that I was going to surf. I remember those humid new york summers and my mom shuttling me back and forth to K road in the Hamptons just so I would have a chance to surf. All of these memories emerged from seemingly nowhere as 12 years later I sat in the pacific waiting for yet another wave. This this is the thing about time and memory that amazes me so much. We often think of time as a linear progression, and that we possess our memories. But maybe memories possess us, they come back to remind us and re-create bits and pieces of our life that we conceive as "past". In that moment my mom was alive in a different sense. Her giving nature, her sense of adventure and sacrifice, all of those are what led me to be paddling out into the pacific this weekend. Small actions, actions she probably thought nothing of but live on for time immortal. Time in this sense lives on. It is not a simple linear flow from one moment to the next. Our memories can re connect us with past moments, illuminating in a sense how we arrived in the present moment. The present moment then is inextricably tied to the past. Those seemingly minuscule moments, the hour or so that my mom and I bought that surf board 12 years ago, weave themselves into the everyday fabric of our lives. For now and forever whenever I paddle down the face of a wave, as the cold pacific water catches my board and it picks up speed, as I quickly hop to my feet I will feel my mom gliding along with me. Call it heaven, call it after life, call it memory, call it what you will but somehow I know in those moments though she is gone in the physical sense she is very much there.
