Here's an old musing.  I found it when going through a list of unfinished drafts.  Anna is 25 now, so I obviously wrote it awhile ago. But I think these same thoughts still, so I'll let it see the light of day.


My firstborn recently turned 20. She celebrated her birthday on the other side of the world from me, though even if we had been in the same hemisphere we would not have been together. She is at college now, and family birthday parties are a thing of the past. But I couldn't help thinking of her all day, even if she was not thinking of me, and found myself trying to remember birthdays past, years past, wondering once again what time is - how it passes, what it means.

I find it so very, very strange to consider how utterly gone the past is. I still stumble over the fact that one cannot retrieve a single piece of the past - that the baby, the toddler, the little girl, the teenager who lived with me for nearly 20 years no longer exists - at least not in any of her former incarnations. I can call up snapshots in my memory - mostly based, I am afraid, on actual snapshots - I find I often have memories of photos, not memories of moments or days.

Like the denizens of Our Town, I find I cannot remember a single day out of my life - not in its entirety. I know I spent years nursing babies, changing diapers, taking toddlers for walks in a huge, double stroller, reading picture books, waking many times a night for feedings, giving small children baths, exploring brooks and worrying over fevers and coughs, but that life is gone - and when I look in the mirror I could almost believe that the young woman who lived it is gone, too. Gone where , is the question?

As I thought about baby Anna, lying in my arms for the first time, 2 year old Anna sitting down beside me with an armload of books commanding, "now read!", 5 year old Anna playing "greedy little mice" with her best friend, 8 year old Anna exploring the brook at our new house for the first time, it dawned on me like a revelation that if we are to really love someone, we have to love them as they stand in front of us - in their present incarnation, if you will, since we humans seem to be always appearing in different forms, the soul clothed in constantly changing garments. You cannot truly love an earlier version of someone unless you love them as they are today.

You cannot love a memory - you can cherish it, treasure it, carefully store it away in the mind's archive, but you cannot love it. Love is active, it is doing, it requires a real world object; you cannot act upon a memory. Faith without deeds, the Apostle James, reminded us, is dead; the same is true of love. I can only really love a real person, the one who is here now.

That is easy in the case of Anna, who is very bit as charming at 20 as she was at 2, but it becomes harder and more uncomfortable truth if I apply it to others in my life. Yet, I am wasting my time wishing this person or that one were more like they used to be, back when. . . . . And I am showing by my inconstancy how feeble my love really is - how un-lovely. People change and change and change and change, but love never fails. "Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds."