LIVING IN THE PAST
Yesterday on my way back from my old man’s group at CornerStone restaurant in Asheville where we go the first Friday of every month I did a number of errands, one of which was to remove the last of the non book boxes that have been stored in my locker for 30 years at enormous cost, only $65 a month but over 30 years thousands of dollars. All that is left now are the books that I felt were so valuable to me that I couldn’t part with them but haven’t looked at in 30 years. Nuts.
The boxes I did remove were covered with dust. They were odds and ends that needed to be sorted out and then thrown out.
But Saturday evening when Susie and I began to leaf through them what we found were boxes and boxes of letters, letters that Kathe and I wrote to each other in Germany as we were getting to know each other at a distance which led to our falling in love, but these letters are also a reminder of my daily life in Germany after I was released from the Army in August and returned to the USA in January of 1962.
All letters, these days, are ephemeral. We rarely write letters since it is so easy to talk on the phone and when we do they are emails which vanish into a virtual void. We have plenty of photographs but they too are all now digital as well and will all vanish not leaving a trace unless we make some great effort to preserve them and pass them on.
But here were boxes of letters, not only mine and Kathe’s but boxes and boxes of my mother’s letters. She seemed to hold onto everything written. I’d forgotten that when I cleared her locker after she died in 2010 I had deposited her boxes, unlooked at, in my locker. Along with letters between my mother and father there were stacks of letters sent back from India to my parent’s parents in Illinois from India during the 1930’s through the 50’s. In those days missionaries would spend six years in India, then go home to the USA for a year’s furlough, and then go back for six years. Letters were they only way to connect with family during that time.
And then there were even letters written by my Grandfather Mosher to his family when a boy. One haunting letter written in the 1880’s by my grandfather, Martin Luther Mosher, was a three page description of a photograph of himself as a boy with his brothers that haunted him all his life. He could remember clearly when it was taken and what it meant to him at the time.
I’ve just glanced through those letters. I can’t throw them out even when I don’t know the people involved. All the rest of the day these letters haunted me. This is all that is left of these people’a lives except for their gravestones.
It is a reminder that soon that is all there will be left of my life and the lives of everyone around me, of family members that I love. It almost seems to be a mockery of my daily activities which seem significant to me like writing this post. Why do it if it is going to so soon vanish? It is only 1’s and 0’s putting black marks on a screen which will begin to fade starting tomorrow and will soon be gone.
Good night everyone, sleep well.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 