the passage of time

These two photographs are taken in approximately the same spot: Salem Rd in Newton County. When I was two we moved to this house and lived there until I was 12. The top photo was taken in 1964, note the old frame house across the road. We lived in a ranch house that I will post a photograph of later - but it looked like a typical red brick ranch house. That ranch house is still there, though painted white now, and the office of a used car lot for the last 20 years. The yard is paved, except for this oak tree I'm standing under as I take the bottom photo. 39 years ago I planted this oak tree from an acorn that I gathered from underneath an oak that grew in my grandparent's yard.
Just last year the cow pasture that had been across the road was sold and developed, all with astonishing speed. Now there's a Kroger. Three months ago I noticed a stop light, right where we used to live. And this time a road has been graded and paved.
This Thanksgiving Jami and I, on the way to see dad and granny Wise, stopped at the neighboring Shell station and I walked over into this yard, this parking lot, and stood in a spot that I hadn't stood in since I was 12, since this oak tree was a slender sapling verging into a mere ability to provide shade. I stood there and took a photograph approximate to the slide my dad took 40 some years ago. That yard was small. How did we fit here? How did it take so long to mow this lawn? How did I get lost in woods as small as a strip mall and a gas station?
More of my youth is erased. My great grandfather's farm, a quarter of a mile down the road, is now under a subdivision and day care center. This whole road, once an obscure country road with two stop signs along 8 miles south of I-20, where very few cars drove on any given day, is now crowded with traffic even at night, houses abound and stores - a McDonald's even across from my great grandfather's old home, and another McDonald's at the interstate.
Now I am resigned to change. When I was a young child my mother read me a story about a house in the country: in image after image a village and then a town and then a city grew around the house, until the house was surrounded by tall buildings. I was fascinated by this progression. I listened to this story over and over. I devised maps as I grew older where I imagined the growth of settlements into cities. I poured over diagrams of progress. Birth growth and deterioration and rebirth fascinated me. The little house in the story is eventually moved out into the country.
What did I feel while I stood on this piece of ground? Not a revelation. Not a recapitulation. A repetition? Maybe the sense that whatever was there for me is no longer there. I can never go back to some simpler time or some time before, some time where a deep mystery might be discerned in its inception. I'm a 47 year old man standing under an oak tree in a small patch of asphalt surrounded by used cars taking a photo of an intersection. Before I was here, even as a 12 year old, there was a dirt road, a dirt road that curved and twisted in different ways, that wasn't straight, and oddly fewer trees punctuating cotton fields. And even further back was there a road or even a path? Indians. Buffalo - Buffalo roamed throughout the eastern seaboard. Perhaps I can find the small road again - but not here.
Once Jami and I went to a small church way out in the country. It was spring and the scene was bucolic. The church was on a hill, overlooking granite escarpments scattered among pasture land. Picturesque. We thought, " how can we get here?" But even there, development was not far away - just over the hill and down the road.
Is it possible, like the small house in the story my mom read to me, to be returned to our beginnings, back into a place of nature's abundance and purity. Isn't this the human desire to return to the garden? If only we can find the way back to Eden, past the fiery sword brandishing angel, through the over grown gates, into a forgotten paradise? Revelation itself ends the human story not back in the garden but in a city. But any garden we might end in is not the original garden. That garden has been traced and erased many times. Like our memories the facts change and are transformed: we discover that the north facing window really faced east; the well house was wooden and not brick; the tree was pine and not ceder. Places we remember so clearly turn out to have never existed; things we don't remember, we did.
When I stand here, what am I remembering - even more so, what am I forgetting? My dad remembers that when I was 12 or younger, that I pestered him no end to go to a stunt car show at the Lakewood fairgrounds. I have no memory of this. Even having my memory jostled, I can not conjure a vague trace of a memory. I have absolutely forgotten something I desired with all my pre-adolescent heart.
The Bible is an artifact of things we've forgotten. We have here narratives recorded - but also narratives lost. The history of the Church is a history of remembering and forgetting - but remembering and forgetting imperfectly.
In the Scottish nudist camp, people are off kilter. I'm sure that pun's been made before. I thought about that this afternoon, as I sat in CPE, and I wrote it down, so I wouldn't forget it. I've thought of better puns, puns that I have failed to record, and now these gems of wordplay are lost to history.
The world is full of things forgotten. Great paintings are now lost. Vermeer painted more than 42 paintings. A van Eyck nude with mirrors, the pendant to the Arnolfini Marriage, was lost at sea. Rembrandt's only sea scape has been lost in a robbery in Boston. We have no way of knowing what the music of the Romans sounded like. Ancient writings are lost to us. What is Beowulf but the popular literature of its day - and what is lost to us from then: more stories of Grendel? different monsters, different heroes.
Under such an oak on such a bit of asphalt did once a child weld a plastic sword in a last ditch confederate stand against the Saxon invaders, saving Guinevere from the dragon, so that Lincoln might drink from the Grail and king Arthur might walk on the Moon. My parents stood in wonder at their sleep walking son under the moonlight. Why did we buy him that sword?

From the Farm

This old tree was photographed last summer as we walked around Jami's family's old farm. I photographed it because it seemed particularly interesting: its lopped off branches and viney growth suggested to me the quality of endurance. This tree has lasted through the loss of many things, but it continues. Shortly after I took this photograph the land across from my childhood home was sold and is now home to a Kroger and several other stores. This large pasture land that was always there is now buried under concrete and asphalt; its gentle curves and undulations are now graded for better drainage and ease of use. Long ago the house I spent the first 12 years of my life was turned into the office for a used car lot; the woods that I played in was plowed under for a shell station; and the road that once carried 2 cars every 10 minutes now carries 50 cars a minute, more perhaps at rush hour. My great grand father's farm is now buried under a subdivision and day care center. A McDonald's and a Wal-Mart are just across the street. When I grew up I was surrounded by farmland, now only strange remnants still exist - houses that haven't gotten the word that they're no longer needed, old homes and farmland that are now weed choked and sprouting signs for hardware stores and other stores - "coming soon." How relentless is change. I told Joe today, as we sat at Twain's and drank some beer, that death comes for all of us, but we live as if in denial. Some people amass large piles of money, resources of wealth, and others struggle to survive: regardless, some and others will find the same end, and that will be the reward of their virtue and the reward for their inattention. All of us stand under this harsh reality, and in our limited time we must ask a question: Am I living, am I conscious of being me in this place with these people? Or am I failing to see, to taste, to feel each atom of existence in each moment of time in that I'm so wrapped up in my worries, my need to get ahead? I think that that's what Kierkegaard was driving at in his Postscript: that systems, ideologies, agendas give us the illusion of control over the limitations of life and the ultimate limitation of death, but that we lose sight of who we are. For Kierkegaard it was an incredible thing that someone might know "humanity as a universal in all its essentials and historical proclivities" and yet fail to be a living individual. When I worked for a web development company I commuted 3 hours each day, I worked in an office with a window but I was hunched over my desk editing - over time I became aware that I wasn't living. I felt my soul being devoured each day.
So I walked with Jami through these fields one last time as they were and I saw this old tree. I remember the feel of the heat and the give of the ground under my feet. I remember the muffled sound of traffic on the Pike. And I hear cicadas. Where is this moment now? Is it with my 12 year old feet as they follow my grandfather across the crusted furrows to see how the corn is coming up? Is it picking blueberries in our old cow pasture and hearing the yellow jackets buzz about us? Is it with the look of my family, dad's face, the preacher's face, nanny's face, as I walked in the door on the day my mother died?