The last gift of time

Lately I am in constant email correspondence with a crowd of these old friends from high school, The Group. Our Gang. It is a great pleasure to share friendship over such a very long time. It is a very present joy to find oneself in some quarters liked and esteemed, however improbable that may still strike some of us. Let us not let pleasant memories rob us of attention to where we are now. Our journeys between then and now are wandering roads. One has quite enough of bringing new people up to speed. It is an unusual privilege to bring old friends up to speed, with whom one has shared experiences half a lifetime past.

On my walk yesterday I was thinking that perhaps for all of us those times were brighter in memory than in experience. For some of us it was particularly dark, but nostalgia flattens the shadows. Memory is a tricksy hobbit.

Janet still asks me (sometimes just in my head) Why? why hold on to all that load of memory? and sometimes I think well, it's useful. Partly useful. Partly useful, mostly dead? But the useful part cannot be separated from the difficult painful part.

I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time; Life Beyond Sixty (just studying up in advance ya know) and she describes being an old person who is peculiarly unafflicted with memory. I am just getting on to a funnier chapter in which she points out, not how boring old people's memories are to young people (and sometimes to other old people, she has already done that), but how young people are better sources of information than they are audiences. Like when you need advice on using your cellphone, or good music that isn't forty years old. Or reminding. Whatever.