MEMORIES
After writing about my house in India yesterday, I realized that I am the only one I know who knew the house as it was when I was a boy. It is still clear in my mind but that is the only place where it still exists, only in my memory and when I go it will be gone completely. My parents are gone, my two years younger brother Ted with whom I shared most of my memories of India, died eight years ago, and my sister, Anne, who died two years ago, could barely remember the house was 9 when she left Allahabad.
All my life there have been people around me who shared my memories. But as I get older, as everyone gets older, those people slip away. And somehow it seems almost eerie to be the only person who remembers something which seemed at the time to be so timeless.
My classmates and I, Landour, India, Woodstock School class of 1954, still keep in touch. In fact, because of email and being able to send photographs easily and even a few times on Zoom we keep in touch more easily now than earlier. The Internet draws us and our memories back together. So the Woodstock School of our growing up is still very alive to us and we can share memories and do. We are not alone with our memories as I am with my house in Allahabad. Even though we’ve grown away from each other, and a number of us or our spouses have died, we still share memories of Parker Hall and the covered passageways and plays that we put on together. Our spouses know about Woodstock and many have visited Woodstock with us, but none of them share our memories, and the group that does will get smaller and smaller and the even the memories we share will fade as our minds begin to wander. Though we may have little in common now after almost 70 years apart we huddle together on the Internet because this sharing of memories is so important.
In a couple of months I will be in Mussoorie again, looking down from Sister’s Bazaar at the top of the Landour hill at the red roofs of Woodstock school, that look the same now as they did then. But I won’t know a soul there and I will he haunted by the presence of those I am still in touch with and by those who are gone, like my friend Ray Smith, whose home I visited, hosted by his widow, Elaine, in Monrovia, California this summer. And the Smith home in Redwood Cottage just above Woodstock will haunt me again.
But of course I am not alone. My story is everyone’s story as they get older and friends and family drop away. My mother certainly felt that way at 95 when everyone her age, even her younger brothers, were gone and the memories of Hall Hill and Buffalo, Illinois were hers alone. It is an eerie feeling.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 