A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

I haven't got a clue what that gobbledygook means, I just thought I'd try to class-up the joint with some fancy multi- or at least bi-lingual stuff.  Here's some more: sotto-voce, dziekuje, dolce vita, schadenfreude, na zdrovie.

Nooo, of course I know what that title means, and you likely do, too; it's usually translated into English as In Search of Lost Time or, more commonly, Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust's epic, seven volume memoir.  Three people alive on the planet have actually read it all (turns out, of course, that Alice B. Fogel is one of them); I fully intend to do so sometime before I die--or after, if I don't get to it soon enough.  I guess I'll probably read it in translation (English, I think), as I haven't been involved with French since 1969, in Monsieur (miss-SEAR) Jules (zhool) Cote's (ko-TAYz)--hey, this phonetic stuff is fun--French II class.  In our Language Lab sessions, we'd sit in little cubicles wearing headphones which piped in someone saying phrases in French, which we were supposed to repeat. The thing is, you could clearly hear when M. Cote clicked in to your particular headphone, so I'd usually just sit there daydreaming--while all about me more conscientious students mumbled away in mangled French--until I heard that "click," at which point I'd begin to mumble something too.  My wife and daughter are both very gifted linguistically; they're gonna be mortified to read this.

All of this is pretty typically Markian preamble to the real topic, only maybe even more so.  I turn 60 in a week, and I'm finding that pretty sobering.  Not so much for what it is now; sure, I notice more aches and pains, less flexibility and stamina, stuff like that, but other than that I don't feel all that different either physically or mentally (Still hangin' right around 14 in that department).  What is hugely different is to look ahead.  How far, exactly, is ahead?  Once it was easy to look forward to a self in 15, 20, even 30 years, and make plans, have hopes and inspirations.  Now?  Probly not so much.

So I'm in a pretty reflective mood, lately, thinking about my past and the people and events who inhabited it with me.  I was born on my great-grandmother Arabelle's 86th birthday.  I'll do the math for you: she was born in 1867, and lived to be 102.  I have sat on the lap of, talked with, eaten foods canned and prepared by, someone who was born two years after the Civil War ended.  In my 30s and early 40s, when I was teaching writing to college freshpeople, I used to talk about that with them as a way to get them to think about their own histories (a surprising number didn't even know their mother's name when she'd been a maiden), to think about how close to us the past really is, how, in Faulkner's famous quote "The past isn't dead.  It isn't even past."  They already thought that I was older than dirt myself, so that had little effect on them, but I'm still stunned by it.

I think that my great-grandmother's lifetime encompassed the most sweeping and largest changes in human life of any hundred-year period in human history.  From horse-and-buggy to lunar modules, icehouses to refrigerator/freezers in private homes, plays to kinescopes to silent films to talkies (and in color!), live music to wax cylinders to 78s to The Beatles; sulfa drugs to penicillin,  vaccines, and on and on.  What must it have been like to witness all of that?

But then, my own time here has certainly seen its share of the amazing and once-miraculous, although much of it is certainly of questionable value. More medical miracles, robots on Mars, men walking on the moon, computers, the whole digital revolution.  The changes in music delivery systems is maybe the most amazing series of developments to me, relatively unimportant though they may be.  To have gone from taping quarters on the tone arms of stereos to keep scratched or warped records from skipping,  to incredibly sophisticated and sensitive turntables, amps, pre-amps, tuners, to tapes, to Walkmen, to boomboxes to iPods is stunning.  Music, again for better or for worse, has become totally portable and ubiquitous.  When I was 16, 18, 20, I was totally at the mercy of whatever radio station I could tune in at a given time in a given area when I was away from my home music system.  I now have an incredibly small device that I can take anywhere with me, and that contains almost 22,000 songs.  Who ever woulda thunk it?

Then there are the social changes although, given the current climate in much of the country, we must be constantly vigilant to hope to maintain them:  blacks became people, women became people and gained, at least for the time being, some semblance of control over their bodies and reproductive rights, gays became people to such an extent that they can even marry.  Pot is apparently going to become legal within the next decade or so.  All of these things would have seemed impossible at the end of my first decade, had I been aware enough to consider them in that context.

So here I sit, Sixty years on, looking back at more time and space than I ever could have imagined, looking forward to an indeterminate, yet assuredly much smaller, chunk of life.  What's weird is that, sometimes, I'm not even sure who I am.  I find myself sitting with leg thrown over the arm of an easy chair, or hands placed just so on the arms, head held at a certain tilt, looking out a window or at my hands, especially whose thumbs, oddly enough, are my father's, and wonder:  am I me, sitting as I'd seen him sit a thousand times, looking out his eyes, somehow, or is it him in me, looking out mine?  Those genes, those associations, those images are incredibly powerful and in lots of ways inescapable.  Not only is the past not dead: as long as we live, the dead from our pasts aren't either.

Well, if you can stand it after all of that maudlin stuff (and I do maudlin with the best of 'em), here are the songs I'll be playing on Tuesday:

Reflection                                                               George Winston
Reflections                                                              Dianne Reeves
Reflections                                                              Michael McDonald
Reflections Of My Life                                          The Marmalade
Reflections                                                              Thelonius Monk
Reflections in D                                                      Duke Ellington
Reflections On Me                                                  Golden Smog
Retrospection                                                           Duke Ellington
Them Changes                                                         Band of Gypsys
Changes                                                                   David Bowie
Recollection Phoenix                                              Willie Nelson
Changes                                                                   Loggins and Messina
Changes Come                                                        Over The Rhine
Changes IV                                                              Cat Stevens
Going Through Changes                                          The Samples
Heavy Changes                                                        Jeb Loy Nichols
See The Changes                                                      CSNY
Sixty Years On                                                         Elton John

World In Changes                                                    Dave Mason
All Our Past Times                                                  Eric Clapton
As The Years Go Passing By                                  Boz Scaggs
As Time Goes By                                                    Harry Nilsson
Time                                                                         Boz Scaggs
Time Is Moving In The Hallway                             Michael Smith
Time Passes On                                                       Orleans
Time Run Like A Freight Train                               Eric Andersen
Time Waits For No One                                           Rolling Stones
Time Won't Let Me                                                  The Outsiders
Who Knows Where The Time Goes?                      Sandy Denny
Time                                                                         Sly & The Family Stone
Time                                                                         Tom Waits
Fading Memory                                                        Eilen Jewell
Memories                                                                  Van Morrison
Precious Memories                                                    Bob Dylan
Old Devil Time                                                          Claudia Schmidt

Optima dies...prima fugit.