Missing

I am writing my life history.

Every day when I’m at work, I try to take my laptop with me to the restroom, and there spend as many minutes as possible writing my history. Depending on the day, traffic in the restroom, and my workload, this can vary from 15 to 45 minutes. Lucky me.

I began the project after I found an old txt file titled, “My History in Music”. It was an attempt to highlight all the songs I hold as significant, and attribute them to a person or place or time.

I think I started this on my Apple PM7200 back in 1996. The songs listed were little more than an inventory of my purchased CD collection: I simply wrote down the titles of the songs I purchased the disc for, and tried to match up some reason why I liked it. The electronic element gave me a way to do this in a semi-nonlinear fashion.

However, the effort was lame at best. I barely made it through ten discs I’d guess. I wrote massive amounts of narrative for StarTrek II: The Wrath of Khan and sometime shortly thereafter became bored with or distracted from the whole project.

Every couple of years, I’d stumble across the file or remember it was there when I heard a fav on the radio, and make a mental note to come back and continue working on it.

I never did.

Until a couple of months ago.

I am working on a data reconcilliation project involving my gathering all the information I have ever created or stored on various computers and media over my lifetime, and sorting (or disposing of) the files into some kind of meaningful organization.

It has been interesting to take a digital inventory of my life. Its been most enlightening to see patterns for data structure emerge and see how they have been repeated in other areas of my life: my library, my filing cabinet, even how my bookmarks are organized. Ultimately, I think this exercise will help with my resolving Grand Unified Theory. But I digress (not suprisingly) *snerk*.

While sorting files I stumbled across my life in music. It became one of those moments from your youth that make you cringe with embarrassment that you were ever so cheesy. However, I also noticed a pattern — with few exception, the files were attributed to people, mostly women. I had basically succeeded in a primative degree to tell my history in music, but it was really a history in women, in people.

Without knowing the stories of the people, their association to the music, and thus the history IN the music, was moot.

So I started a new file. My History

Early on, it followed the prototype of the music file. I wrote out the stories and importance of the women I had listed, and provided a chronological framework relating them to each other. Since then I have moved on — or back, actually — and have started writing my memoirs from preschool.

Right now, its fairly stream-of-consciousness. Partly because I think thats how anyone would start a project like this. But also because my personality type sees time as modal, not linear, and as a preschooler I had no real concept of clock or calendar time. So many of my memories just flow together and I have to hunt for specific locations or people in those memories to help me set the timeline.

Anyway, today I was writing about trips with my mother to her family seat some 200 miles from here. That got me thinking about the few special trips to my grand parents’ funerals, and the impact of those times on my mom, and her impact on me during those periods.

I was remembering us cousins, not attending my grandmother’s funeral, and our mutual and mostly unspoken understanding that death was a part of life and this grief process was something for the adults, not for us. And we were free to, perhaps obligated to, instead enjoy our time together (being often heaped into a conceptual ball in front of the TV in my grandparents’ home).

That lead me to more memories of time spent in their home, their yard, us cousins being led up the block to see a movie in this tiny rural town’s theater, The Moore, on a summer night, and chasing ourselves in their huge white picket-fenced yard, and blowing up pop bottles on the front stoop and…

…and discovering that something is missing.

I can remember those times very clearly. I can remember the sights, the smells, the sounds; I can remember the national tension about the resolution of a war overseas, and the local tension anticipating the harvest. I remember how free it felt — it actually FELT FREE — to be chased around the yard by my cousins, and then spin and chase them.

And why do I not feel free anymore?

I am not so changed that I no longer remember. I am not so changed that I do not recognize those feelings when I remember.

Why don’t we chase each other anymore?

What’s missing? From me? Today? Where has that gone, and how can I get it back?

I’m not saying that I have no responsibilities as an adult. I’m not saying I want to be so like a child again as to have no responsibilities.

But why won’t someone chase me? For just an hour, just until dark? Why can’t I …

*and tears form as I wrote that…*

…because I don’t have kids. That’s why. Parents get to do that with their kids — not all the time, but its there for them when they want to, when they can.

*sigh*

I don’t know. Maybe thats not the answer, maybe its not the whole answer, and maybe it is. I don’t want to be as cliche’d as to try to recapture my youth through my children, but what about sharing my youth WITH my children? I have no answer in any case…

I just know something is missing.