Last Days
Remembering Always Remakes the Past to Please the Present
The steps up to the park path run wet from what the morning air couldn’t hold. We’re a little late, not that it matters. Last day and all. The moon feels closer.
We’ve made this walk 180 times in the past nine months. We’ve seen the trees fatten, variegate, thin, refatten. School has its own seasons, too. We’ve passed through bridge study (“Do you know how many cables are in the Brooklyn Bridge?”), Native American study (wigwams sound better than longhouses), multiplying with decimals, flipping fractions.
They don’t hold my hand on the way as they used to, though my daughter will still keep hers in mine if I reach first. My son, forget it. He goes to middle school next year and has already begun to drift into the phase of fraught gestures, the period of bafflement about oneself and others that won’t lift until his body settles, if ever. He’s taller than his mother now, and the geometry between us constantly shifts such that we’re never quite sure where to look. He walks behind us, just a few feet, either from distraction or by decision. It’s unclear which.
Lasts have a feel, and this isn’t it. New York public schools keep kids nearly through the end of June, but school has been sputtering out for weeks. They’ve had field day, movie day, movie day again, and half days where the school half consists of stuffing months of their work into grocery bags that we will keep in their rooms until we’ve all forgotten about it.
I worry about forgetting, but even I, someone drawn to lessons and laws, have trouble finding much I want them to remember of these school days. Fractions, maybe, or how to get from one room to the next without the trouble of thinking. The rest, however, will rightly go. In just a few years they will struggle to name all the faces in the class photo; I’ll want them to forget the ones I won’t.
We tend to remember few last days in favor of bits of days repeated over and over. They will recall, I’m sure of it, the herringbone brick of the park path, or how the sidewalk just past the Duane Reade was always freshly washed, regardless of season. The line of dogs to enter the run where we angle across the street through cabs anxious for fares. The slight hill down to the open gate full of kids running late, their bags chasing them on their backs.
Problem is, too much presents itself to be remembered. This is the kind of morning I feel I should be capturing on my phone (like nearly everyone else), but this moment is just another of which there are too many. Nothing is more cliché than the fact that this time passes like any other, and this cliché, like all others, is boring. Besides, to photograph or video or even to write about it as I’m doing right now is to make a new moment. Remembering is always a remaking of the past to please the present.
Philip Larkin — someone who struggled perhaps more than anyone with last days and their piled atmospheres of meaning — describes childhood as a forgotten boredom. By this astonishing phrase I think he means that our younger lives have so much time that means so little, time so wonderfully inconsequential and meant to escape memory — at least until remade by our older selves.
I wish my son and daughter a good day at the open gate like always, and, like always, I mean it. We don’t need to touch. This gate will close and then swing open again while we’re not looking. I head off to another unremarkable day of work that has been and will be like so many others. Where can we live but days?
But with them to remember, it always feels like the beginning of something.
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Photo by Tiffany Bailey
