Of course there are
salient moments in my life. We all have
them. Those moments that are burned into our brains either because they
were wonderful or horrible or funny or uniquely ordinary, those moments that
stay with us always, those moments that other people remember differently but
we know that what we remember is accurate; those are the moments that give us
pause, or perspective, or peace. In
those moments, we come to accept and understand who we are, what confuses us,
what seems right to us and how we connect to the world.
We have thousands
of those moments, but like old photographs, with time they fade. We can bring them back by writing a journal
entry, or sharing an experience that other people chronicle, or by a fragrance,
a jewel, or a particular word. Sometimes
it doesn’t take much. Sometimes listening
to someone else’s moments will trigger a remembrance of our own moments and we
swim through the immediate back to the what-was and animate the memory in the
glory of glossy fuzziness. Other times a
location, an interaction, a reference may bring to mind a long inactive,
igneous formation of a moment long since cooled and now rewarmed, thawed and
dripping into now.
They are worth
remembering. And keeping. And passing on. I have a friend who appreciates that and has
spent the past several years writing and remembering and poetizing those
moments. He has become masterful at both
keeping salient moments and sharing them.
The sharing of them has cost him a lot in money, time and emotion. He has been dedicated to distilling the
distinguished ordinary into an elixir of insight that carries his grandchildren
back to his grandparents and introduces them to each other. He is the teamster of the magic carpet that transmits
us all to those indestructible moments that are the DNA of family currency.
Of course, it’s
humbling to be trusted with these life-building moments. They are fragile, yet forever; tinsel, yet
steel; twigs yet bricks in the architecture of his life. He counts himself lucky, and maybe he
is. Or, maybe he was a little more
careful than he realized when he decided to go out on a limb and build a family
tree that would last for generations. I’m
an appendage to his tree – merely a friend.
But, a dear enough friend that he allowed me passage into his most
salient moments. And thus, they have become
mine, and I am better. Thanks, Quentin.
