Cycling

What is it about these trips home that make me feel like a time traveler, that have me spinning through life cycles and making my way, dizzy, from one event to the next?

Last week we drove up the Thruway to my grandparents’ house. We sat at their kitchen island—as I have been doing since I was Naomi’s age—and ate tuna fish sandwiches on white bread. I heard stories about my grandma’s childhood in Ireland; Naomi and Grandpa talked about math. We looked at our house in New Zealand on Google Earth. Two uncles, an aunt, and a cousin stopped by (low yield for a family with literally dozens of people in it but we gave them little notice). I can remember evenings filled with people at Thanksgiving, with barely enough room to reach for vats of mashed potatoes or platters towering with turkey. Now the house, twice expanded, contains thousands of hours of memories—not just mine (not mostly mine) but of the dozen children and 30+ grandchildren and now the great grand children who eat tunafish at the counter and swim in the pool (new since I was an adult) in the summer. The refrigerator holds pictures of babies I didn’t know were even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, of families grown enough to be unrecognizable. This is a big family, and I live far away. Still, when my grandmother tells stories about her glass-cutting relatives in Ireland, I feel a kind of childlike delight. When my grandfather twinkles with a smile saying, “Come on, Jenny, let me show you something,” and walks down the hall to his study, I follow him with the kind of anticipation I had when I was Naomi’s age. And when I leave them I wonder—as I do when I leave anyone, but harder—when we’ll see these lovely people again.

A few days later I sat around a big table at my Aunt Patty’s house. Here, on the other, smaller side of the family (Dad has only 6 siblings), I know all the cousins and their children, and there are no grandparents left to tell me stories or show me mysterious gadgets. On Saturday there was a little gathering for us Kiwibergers—medium yield for this family with three sets of aunts and uncles, four first cousins (and partners) and three first cousins once removed. Aunt Patty was the one I spent the most time with as a kid because she was the mom of Tara, my favorite cousin. When I was a kid, I lived farther away than nearly any of my cousins, and I lived with my mom. This meant that I wasn’t at the regular family events and didn’t see this closely-knit family as much as they saw one another. When I was there it was a major party time, and livingrooms would be filled with adults talking and dandling babies on knees or at breast, kitchens with (mostly women) chopping, mixing, cleaning, and family rooms or bedrooms filled with cousins making up games or plays or just zooming around the house. I loved these gatherings, loved racing through the living rooms to catch a glimpse of beloved aunts and uncles. I loved slowing down through kitchens to see whether I could spy the plastic-wrapped chocolate chip cookies someone had brought, hiding until everyone had had enough dinner. And beyond it all I loved the time with my cousins, the stories we told, events we organized, silly games we played. Tara and I, as the eldest, kept the little ones under control, half babysitters and half queens of the domain.

Since the last time I was in the US with my kids, there has been a distinct shift. I’ve had three more cousins in my generation head to college, one more get engaged and another married. There are two more babies on the way. Only two of my aunts and uncles have kids home at all anymore; the rest are talking about their grandchildren. Of the 19 cousins in my generation, only three are still at home, only one a kid.

This means that my aunts and uncles aren’t the generation who produces the children and checks up on the cousins racing the house; that’s now my generation. The cousins that make up stories and play games? Those are my kids’ generation, with Naomi the eldest of the bunch, leading her smaller cousins around, keeping the peace, being the tattletale. The aunts and uncles sit in the living room and tell stories about their kids in college, pass albums of weddings, wax lovingly about grandchildren, and are beginning to look rather like my grandmother as I remember her most strongly.

In some ways, this is just part of the family cycle, right? It is the uncanny way that two best cousins produce children who love one another and pal around at the next generation’s family event. It is the echo of the mother in the voice of the daughter, the taste of a meal we have had at family gatherings for my whole life, the rhythms of family patterns and habits held steady over time.

But I keep hearing my father’s voice, deep with melancholy, after Naomi told him she couldn’t wait until she had silver hair like his. He looked at her, golden hair shining in the Grand Canyon sun, and said he thought she’d be beautiful that way. And in his mind he was thinking, “but I’ll never see it.”

This is a one way cycle, the patterns of the generations repeat in a beautiful and encouraging way, but we only get one ride around. My aunts and uncles are taking my grandmother’s place, but Grandma left that place more than three years ago. The last time I looked up, I was amazed that I was joining the generation of my aunts and uncles and producing children. Now, more than a decade later, I realize that I was actually replacing that generation, stepping into the major childbearing role into my large and growing family. At Aunt Patty’s, I realized that I have stepped out of that role. No more will new baby announcements come from us. We are moving on into the comfortable and beautiful time of raising these lovely children of ours rather than producing more of them. We are crossing thresholds we cannot cross back over. This is not going to be news to anyone, and at the same time, each time I get a real sense of it, it is a punch in the stomach. On this trip, I am getting a lot of punches.

A mid-trip, mid-life crisis? I finish this blog more than a week after leaving Patty’s, in a swank hotel in Chicago where I’ll do work I enjoy with people I enjoy. I have a beautiful life, and it would have been unimaginable to me as one of those cousins racing around my Aunt Patty’s house 25 years ago. I love my life, which makes my increasing awareness of its temporality all the more bittersweet. Would I like to be a kid again, with all this in front of me? Absolutely not. I guess my central question is about how to maintain the knowledge that each day is a gift—a gift we will never get again—and live my limited time on earth fully. All of these are clichés. I remember thinking in college that nearly every poem is about love or death. Or both. In college, this death obsession seemed macabre, a constant restatement of the obvious, a focusing on the dark rather than turning toward the light. Now I feel it differently. It once seemed to me that Andrew Marvell’s famous poem was a pick up line, a clever, if cheap, come-on at a party. Now it strikes me (perhaps additionally) as the truth:

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Remembering about my one way ticket helps me focus on what I want from this short ride. In the eyeblink of parenting my children, what do I want them to take with them? In the flash of a career, what do I want to accomplish? In the ringing notes of my friendships and loves, what do I want to experience and to give? I don’t want to notice my mortality constantly, but neither to I ever again want to forget it. The end of playboy Marvell’s poem is a call, not just to lust, but to life:

Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.