That surprising realization on the part of the protagonist in the novel about a residential facility for teens in Maine that the man she worked with was not interested, really, in the facility, his job, Maine, or anything else but finishing his doctorate, moving on to a real job, elsewhere.
Familiar.
When weekend came and everybody went home. When everybody leaves in the evening and you remain on duty.
When you realize that everyone has someplace else to be.
There’s something. Riveting. About the realization of the transitory. Everyone moving on. Plans. Goals. A future.
The moon is not up yet over to Bald Mountain.
I am a teenager in high school. I begin to sense that high school is a temporary passage. The athletes on scholarship would go on to be insurance salesmen and actuarial trainees.
The nice girl met at a dance would go home to her mom and dad, brothers and sisters and the boy she liked from the neighborhood.
That all of them would marry, move to suburbs, have kids, and drive pontiacs and chevys, serve on church or town committees.
The sense of loneliness back then when the notion arose that this, this, wasn’t it, that there was something else, somewhere else, someone else that people were gravitating to, planning for, acting on.
It was surprising. My immature view of things.
Then time passed.
I sat on a cushion. Breath came and went.
Once it was “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” But that wasn’t true.
Then it became: “The more things change, the more they become themselves.” Or, “The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself.”
Yes, that’s it — it becomes itself, the more it changes.
It had been a shock that things did not remain the same. A summer afternoon. A walk by the narrows with an Italian nurse. A blue jay on a branch.
Sitting on the ground in a schoolyard with a bevy of men and women in religious habits. The flash of connecting eyes. She leaves for Japan. Ten years pass. Spackling the walls of a house where folks lived in poverty. Body movement in improvisational theater at university workshop. Walking to school during school years with the tall girl from 70th street and being tongue tied to say anything at all. Walking down subway stairs. Different stops.
Moments of steadfast immediacy, a Parmenidean insistence on unchanging Being. And nearby, lurking, Heraclitus gesturing that it is going to change, will soon change, and any construct of shutterblink permanence would fade like an old Polaroid photo left outdoors and forgotten under sun and rain.
This, this, changes.
All of it. Changes.
Not that I became friends with time. With time passing. With place changing. With same and different.
You don’t have to like your traveling companions. You do, however, have to travel with them. And they will turn, and wave, goodbye. Both people and time.
And there you are. In the throes of elsewhere. The passing of time. Of places. Of those, you were, once, with.
