The Kindness of Time

Sometimes the past jumps up and bites you – it’s surprising, painful and regrettable. But sometimes it washes over you with a kindness that comes with the passing of time. It covers your vision with a nostalgic patina viewed through experience and the hard-earned wisdom, finally, of what’s really important after all.

Anyone who has had a close family member or friend die will tell you that the first few weeks of grief are raw and invasive. You feel the need to remember as a measure of respect, but the memories are just too painful. As time grinds down the tender, hard edges, the softer memories come creeping in one-by-one. And after enough time, you are left with sweetness – those few select memories that you are willing to hold close and examine.

My young friends have for some time been urging me to open a Facebook account. I refused to give in for so long. But, to steal an appropriate line from my friend Donna, resistance is futile. Part of the reason I held off for so long is that I know my personality and I knew (and I was right) that it would become a major time sponge. But the flip side is that I can be online with my friends from Northern Virginia that I so miss and I can pretend that I will once again see them in church on Sunday morning. The other great pleasure has been in rediscovering friends from my past. I made just such a connection today and I am carrying that glow of nostalgia – my past looked at through eyes that know what’s really important.

Because in truth, we simply cannot deny the importance of the details of our growing up. They are in us, deep, and we can ignore them or pretend they never happened but they have helped to shape who we became.

Take hounds for instance. I was raised with beagles, lots of them. My daddy was a hunter and he kept a pack of beagles. I didn’t see much of them because they stayed in a pen down in the back, but I did have a beagle that was my pet in the house. When she died, I got a bassett hound. Hounds were always there for me to wrap my arms around and exult with or cry to.

My fondest memory of my daddy is of one Sunday morning when he got me out of Sunday School and we sneaked back home during church. Understand, we never missed church and this added to the spirit of adventure. One of the beagles had puppies and they were being weened. He needed to feed them and we gave them several saucers of milk. They knocked them over, lapped up the milk and began to lick the extra off each other’s faces. We laughed until we cried.

I grew up and moved on to cats and cocker spaniels. Over the last few years, though, I found myself yearning for a hound. When Chloe, my coonhound, came up on the rescue website, I was lost. I fell instantly in love with her because she so reconnected me with my past.

I guess the beauty of rediscovered past for me is that I see family and friends through different eyes. We’ve all grown older, some chubbier, some thinner, some balder; but I see them through gentler eyes. I see fewer defects, idiosyncrasies and flaws because I see the good things I remember and I know the other stuff just doesn’t matter. Time mellows.