Only Now

In the distance, I caught a glimpse of a heron soaring above the sea, and colorful little finches perched on the leafy branches of a tree, and I heard the sad cooing of a mourning dove. The late afternoon sunlight warmed my face, and the evening train rattled by, and there was nothing at all but now.

“This moment is really all we have,” said my friend Kappy. “People forget that, but I’ve finally learned it. Everything is fleeting, and nothing is guaranteed except this very moment we are in right now.”

And even that moment had ended by the time those words were spoken.

But on a bigger screen, what a time this is! We are in the midst of a historical uprising, a cataclysmic shift, a transformative moment on an epic scale. It is painful and scary, and outcomes are (as always) uncertain, but here we are, bearing witness.

“We have front row seats,” says Kappy.

All the threads have come together: global pandemic, injustice, poverty, natural disasters, greed and corruption, and the long arm of the too many shameful horrors reaching in, a terrible weariness turning to anger. Dare we be hopeful? I say we have no choice.

As readers of this blog will know, I became a grandmother two weeks ago. Now each day has an added dimension for me. I imagine myself as an ancestor, living through an era that for my grandson will be the hazy long-ago, in some way formative, but impossible to imagine. Will he even wonder what it was like? I think of my own grandfather sometimes, walking the dusty streets of Boscoreale as a boy, boarding a ship in the port of Naples, disembarking into the raucous streets of New York City in 1905. It’s hard to imagine the world of my forebears much further back than that.

I touch the dirt in my garden today, and I feel the ancient past. I water my precious oak seedlings and envision a noble tree growing tall in the canyon long after I am gone, beneath which my grandson as a young man will one day possibly stand. I document as best I can, hoping that someday in the distant future he––or anyone––will read the stories, recognize the feelings, and perceive us as the humans that we were. We struggled to make sense of things, but gradually we realized that it wasn’t sense we needed, and maybe sense was nothing more than a human invention. In any case, we did our best.

I love to look at the old black and white photos my father and mother took in Prospect Park when they were young parents. I am touched by their innocence and optimism, the way they gleamed with dreams, my mother in a woolen coat and high heeled shoes, a wriggling baby in her arms, the unposed antics of the rest of us, our funny, dear possessions–a Davy Crockett hat, a pinwheel, my tiny patent leather pocketbook. I picture my father, the one most often behind the camera, so handsome and formidable, and how he moved through the hardships to come, unbowed and brave until his too-young dying day. I carry his DNA, and I strive to uphold his values–and the knowledge that he has a great-grandson fills me with gratitude and wonder.

I grew up and far away from those childhood years, and for a while I was always leaving. I watched the 1970s through the windows of Greyhound buses and furnished rooms and dismal offices with space heaters at my knees. I made a lot of mistakes. But eventually I found courage, or maybe I was finally just too desperate to be afraid, and I became the proud progenitor of my future self. I’m lucky to have landed here, embraced by hills and sky. I pick oranges from a tree and watch hummingbirds and butterflies, and I hear coyotes and frogs in the night. I am paying close attention.

Social distancing is easy here. We were always rather isolated, and much of the tumult and tragedy in the outside world can seem abstract and remote. But I have come to understand that here is but one tiny tributary of a great river leading to an infinite sea, and everything that happens beyond is happening, indirectly, to all of us, and I cannot look away. I care too much, for the tiny little time traveler genetically connected to me, and for the children not my own. I believe in community, and ripple effect, and the unknowable repercussions of even the smallest deeds.

So all we have is this ephemeral moment in whatever “here” we happen to be, and as Kappy says, it’s front row seats to a remarkable period of history–or maybe more accurately for some of us, private opera boxes–but we have been given the spectacular honor of bearing witness, and what do we do about that?

We are all interconnected in this vast and complicated now, and as the boundaries of our separateness blur, the moments merge into timelessness.