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I took a couple of audio-visual trips down Memory Lane over Labor Day weekend.
My first trip consisted of dusting off two VHS tapes and watching some “home movies” of the high school band trip to Canada that I went on when I was a senior in high school back in the summer of 2002.
Although I and some of my peers may have rolled our eyes at the time, I’m very grateful that one of the parent chaperones on the trip was constantly using his camcorder and captured more than a dozen hours of memories as they were happening.
Among the “highlights” on the tapes was seeing 18-year-old, and quite acne-faced, Kevin in all his high school band greatness along with seeing my friends at the time and how young we all looked. (I played trumpet in case you’re curious).
Another trip was more indirect, but still sentimental.
While watching the movie The Philadelphia Story (1940) with a delightful co-audience, I found myself distracted and thinking about the time I was in a pit orchestra in the summer of 2001 for a production of High Society, the musical version of the same story (I also played trumpet for that, although I played guitar the following year in the pit for Crazy for You and was the assistant musical director).
Where did the time go?
Both of these sentimental journeys had the same effect on me.
I lost myself in the memories and then was snapped back to the present realizing these things were 18 and 19 years ago respectively.
Those are big numbers. Where did all the time go?
I was somewhat close to the people with whom I shared both of these experiences, but time had drifted us all apart.
I started going through in my head all of the people I had known, talked to, and spent time with during these past experiences.
There were a lot of “oh yeah!”s and “I forgot about him/her!”s as I began to see the old faces on the tapes, or the names on the website showing past members of the summer company.
A few subsequent Facebook searches showed me that time had changed a lot of things for some of these people.
Many were married and with kids. Many, like myself, were not living near my hometown area of Two Rivers-Manitowoc, Wis., anymore — some even further away from there than I am now.
Two questions kept circulating in my brain: What happened to these people and how/why did I lose touch with them? Why didn’t I get to know some of these people better when I had the chance?
A shrinking circle
I’ve found as I’m getting older [insert the “You’re not that old” response here], the circle of people in my life is shrinking.
Gone are the days of being in school and being involved in organizations with a large group of people with all the same age and status in life.
Gone are the days of meeting slews of new people quite frequently and learning how special and unique they really are.
Is it really a bad thing if we only see a few people on a weekly basis versus potentially dozens like back then?
Nah. That’s just life.
Let’s be happy and thankful for the people that stuck around and didn’t drift away from us.
Let’s also accept that for most of the people we’ve lost touch with over the years, there were reasons for it, and usually nothing bad or nothing we did wrong.
Everyone has their own paths in life and sometimes ours just happen to cross with others.
Of course, it’s easy for me to think about the past from the mindset of a 36-year-old.
The 2020 edition of Kevin would have done things differently and savored those times more, whereas I’d like to think the 2001 and 2002 versions of me did the best he could.
So why the title of this editorial? Albeit more meaningful than I had originally meant it, as I was trying to sleep the night I was lost in thought over the past, I felt compelled to listen to the song “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” by Johnny Thunders.
He’s right. You can’t. But we can put our arms around the now. Even when now becomes then, and we miss who and what has passed, we can still be happy that these memories happened at all and be grateful for the people who shared them with us.