Guest Blogger: Fred First

[EDITORIAL NOTE: I'm returning from Maine today, so this is the last guest post until next time. Fred First, of Fragments From Floyd, writes beautifully (as he always does) of the moments that mark our lives in a piece he titles In Good Time. Please welcome him to TGB and don't forget to visit his blog too.]

I was, but I was not in time on New Year’s Eve, 1950. Events came and marked time’s passing—Christmases, and especially birthdays—measured by the number of fingers I held up, of candles I blew out and made a wish. But time then held no promise or threat of change in my life. If it moved at all, time parted around me; it moved with imperceptible slowness then and was no enemy.

I was twelve when I first grasped the potential of time’s gravity, and conceived of someday, being “old.” I watched time falling, counted down its hours, then the final seconds of 1959 as the Big Ball descended to welcome a new decade, a number divisible by ten small fingers. That night, I grasped that I stood at risk for more of these decade changes ahead in life. I did the arithmetic: in the auspicious year of 2000, I would be fifty two. For the first time, I looked far ahead into this mystery, dreading vaguely that I might, after all, be moved ahead by time’s current or more likely, that its unspeakable dimension would pass through my body as I held my place firmly in perpetual youth of heart and mind. And hold my place, I intended to do.

Life beyond eternal childhood held no appeal for me; I had returned again and again to watch Peter Pan fly above the clouds in perpetual childhood. I vowed I would become one of the Lost Boys. At that threshold of the sixties, I puckered my face in the mirror, forty years into the future, into a wizened distortion of an incomprehensible evolution to come and tried to imagine aging. I vowed that I would not go peacefully.

And yet, carrots dangled just beyond reach on the infinitely progressing front edge of time—girls, rock and roll, and driving—the kinds of adventure and reward that growing older promised. At fifteen, I was almost ready to put away childish things. Expectations beyond Christmases and birthdays filled a haunting place called The Future. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long” the Beach Boys sang at a high school dance. I understood.

Time was a barrier to be breached, a distance to be crossed between today and everything I thought I might want in my grown-up life to come. I was stuck in the present waiting, with years of sub-adulthood to endure. This odd force like gravity was an adversary, an empty wasteland of plodding youth that, barring a time machine—a recurrent adolescent fantasy—would have to be endured if I was to reach the prize: independence, adventure, amour, and freedom from acne. Adulthood.

Ten fingers later—it came so quickly, looking back—in 1970, I was married and in graduate school. That year my new passion for photography forever changed my view of time. I learned then to savor present moments. Every unique photograph snapped a marker in time, held it in the emulsion of memory, capturing in perfect synchrony that vertical line of precise moment where it intersects the coordinates of particular place.

No two photographic instants were the same, and there was no going back. Time was a moving stream and with my lens I fished from it as days flowed through the faces I knew, past the places I loved, leaving the lived, the known moments bobbing on its smooth surface, receding deeper and deeper, Doppler-like, into a realm that we could photograph, could know just once, just now.

I spent three more decades behind the camera, not wishing I were older, happy for the past, but savoring photographic instants in the present when one face or one flower, one sunset, yet another family pet or one more grandchild’s candle-covered birthday cake filled the viewfinder. And when the year 2000 came, I was still alive—much to the amazement of the freckled twelve-year-old me I could see in memory with such clarity that millennial New Year’s Eve.

And while my twenty-first century face was indeed pleated by laugh lines and crow’s feet, creased like my old first baseman’s glove, it was the face of the same Lost Boy, riding time like a pair of skates, surfing its glassy surface to the vanishing point, standing still but moving through it, moment by precious moment, aging, after all.

Comments

[Suzann]

What a beautiful post - I have a calligraphy on my wall:

We never really grow old it seems
We keep in our heart our fancies and dreams
And in a corner all tucked away
Is the child we all were yesterday

Thanks Fred - perfect for my weekend reflection.

[Joy]

Fred, this is just a beautiful piece. Poignant and filled with truth of those days growing into adulthood. Made me reflect on my own personal journey. You are an amazing writer...thanks so much for sharing this with us. Though I haven't been there before, I think I'll be visiting your site.

[goldenlucyd]

Exquiste, inspiring prose!
lucyd

[joared]

Ah, what visual pictures your words conjure ... what memories they elicit.

[kenju]

Fred, you are a wonder, as always!

[Cowtown Pattie]

What a wonderful delicious storyteller you are!

Love your stuff, Fred.

[Claude]

Beautiful piece! Thanks