How is a life defined? Is it measured by family and analyzed within those relationships? Is it remembered by lovers and that passion and then possible regret over wistful choices? Is a life built upon a meaningful career? Maybe it is all of those things, or perhaps at the end nothing matters as so much falls away.
I have always been able to recall most of my life, very little of my minutes became forgotten or lost. A car will pass on West 19th Street and the sound will remind me of when I lived on Independence Avenue in Brooklyn and I could hear that same sound as cars passed on Bay 8th Street.
There would be days I would sit with my grandma at the window of this house and count the blue and black cars that passed as we waited for my parents to return from a day trip. That white door is the same door through which I left to go have my tonsils removed. I can still hear the neighbor Camille telling my father she would leave a banana peel on the step so after he slipped my operation would have to be canceled. I can remember so much of the few short years we lived there.
"This street is where it all happened, not much now. Why do we always expect home to stay the same? Nothing else does. It's funny how when you're a kid a day can last forever. Now, all these years seem just like a blank." --- Bobby in Hearts in Atlantis
When I was a teacher, I would often hear "Miss Levine is the prettiest teacher ever." I was in Bonwit Teller and a woman told me she was an artist and she had never seen a face as perfect as mine. An administrator at Hunter College told me a woman with a face as beautiful as mine should never have to think about a degree. Now, that all seems so silly.
Because just like that, I became an old lady... and that face that once was is gone. And what will roll out in my future is a mystery.
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