Nostalgia

I have great nostalgia for my own past and the distant past. I am enough of a realist to recognize that the past was problematic. The life I live today couldn't have been lived fifty years ago. I love my tivo and my female life partner (not in the same way!). And I recognize that neither tivo nor an open relationship with my honey would have been possible way back then in black and white land.

Two women died this week who affected my life in different ways. When I was in college, filled with the kind of post-feminist angst that seems only possible in the 1980s, I fell into a pleasant obsession with Wendy Wasserstein and her plays. I saw Heidi Chronicles on Broadway with Christine Lahti (Joan Allen originated the part) and was sure that Heidi spoke to me and my "issues" in a profound way that no one else could understand. My Dad, who took me to see the play, recognized the obsession (if not the reason for it) and went back to the theater the night after was saw it and asked to buy a Christine Lahti Heidi poster. The play had just won the Pulitzer and Allen was coming back. We had seen the last Lahti performance. They had no more posters. Dad talked them into selling him the one from the marquee signed by the cast and Wasserstein. He then got it framed for me. I loved Wasserstein. I never met her, of course, but she had things to say to me.

Lillie Scoville ran an alternative pre-school/kindergarten in Atlanta called the Out-of-Doors-School. Miss Lillie was an amazing woman. Tough and fair minded. She taught me to read and caught me in a lie or two for which I was always embarrassed. There were other teachers at the school, but Miss Lillie was one of those presences that shone bright and clear in my mind. She attended one of my mother's churches and I had lunch with her once ten or twelve years ago. She was gracious and thoughtful. By that time, she couldn't see very well. But she told me I was beautiful. It was a nice thought, I suppose. I laughed, but she meant it.

Miss Lillie and Wendy both left me this week. Left me to think about what they meant to me and the others whose lives they touched.

Billy Collins has a wonderful poem called "Nostalgia" the last verse of which I have always particularly liked:

"As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess."

There are people I know and love who are sure that we will meet again with those who we have lost. I have to content myself with the hope that they are right and the promises I've heard my whole life are true.

I do know that my heart is full for their presences in my life.

Happy journeys.