Memories: Would you change them?

MEMORIES: WOULD YOU CHANGE THEM? It’s been years since I picked up the poetry book that my sister, Susan, gave me for my eighth-grade graduation—The Best Loved Poems of the American People, compiled by Hazel Felleman, copyright 1936 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York. Susan knew how much I loved poetry; she knew it spoke to my heart.

As a child, I would check out poetry books from the Fleet Street Library and somehow prop them up behind the sink so that I could memorize the poems while I washed the dishes. No, I never got the books wet—that would be a sacrilege of the worst kind. Books, although outwardly inanimate, were alive with the energy of words.

This week, I picked up that well-worn book with its yellow pages and broken binding to give the gift of a poem to a friend who was moving on to a new job. And, once I had that book in my hands, I was overwhelmed with the emotion of seeing an old friend after years of absence.

Poems started to run through my mind as a ribbon through an antique typewriter, and my sister’s inscription on the first page brought tears to my eyes.

At this age, the age where there is more time behind us and less before us, memories are so easily prompted and deeply felt. Some are delightful; others make one’s toes curl; there are those that bring regret, those that affirm a life well lived; and there are those that leave us considering the “what if” and the “if I only knew then what I know now” thoughts of our lives.

But we can only know what we know when we know it. I often muse what it would be like to know what I know now and be forty years younger. Would I be happier? Or would that knowledge be a burden? I’d be richer as I would know what stocks to invest in! But would I be bound by the sorrow that I knew was coming?

Think about that in your own life. Would you want to know all that you know now and be forty or fifty or sixty years younger? Drop me a line—I’d love to hear your thoughts!