From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

April showers bring May flowers and glorious sunshine, breaking up ice, opening the lake for boats to speed across the water. We’re early this year getting our dock into the lake thanks to our son who runs Bayside Marina.

Rhubarb tips and tulips are peeking through the dusty grass and dried leaves. Creeping Charlie has begun its yearly takeover in the lawn and gardens. Time to get out the rakes, fertilizer and weed killer.

My most treasured reminders of spring are the blue wild hyacinth and sprouting spring beauties in the wooded park across from our house, the mottled leaves of trout lilies and dutchman’s breeches as well as the teensy purple, white and pink violets.

I miss the huge old maples in our yard that had to be cut down as they were dying. A few others are budding and the willow’s branches are sprouting yellow tendrils, which will soon be waving in the breeze. Fat raccoons are prowling the woods: a few are probably sleeping in holes in our aged maple trees and under the deck. Neighborhood dogs are noisy, barking at all the creatures enjoying spring’s eruption of hopping bunnies and teasing squirrels. The ticks are out, and soon pesky mosquitoes will buzz and strike at our white winter skin.

Our aged, wooden Adirondack chairs are scaling, drastically in need of sanding and repainting. The wood deck and house need a power wash and oiling. Weekend rains cleaned our folding lawn chairs so we could sit outside on the deck at Easter, enjoying the company of relatives and friends. Soon the loons will join the ducks and geese on the lake, and we will, once again, hear their haunting cries.

Spring brings so many changes. Soon I’ll not have the time to enjoy reading books as often as I had this winter. Our long Minnesota winter days let me enjoy entering other worlds in books, which I love to explore. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” wrote Francis Bacon. That’s exactly how I felt last week as I read and thought about many ideas in Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” a page-turning meditation on aging, memory and regret. I was enraptured with Barnes’ insights about youthful insecurities, aged regrets and false recollections. “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you,” wrote M.J. Adler. I identified with Barnes’ teenage characters suffering the insecurities of dating, body changes and shifting friendships as well as his aging character stewing about a boring past and humdrum present life. As I read, I agreed with John Kieran’s words, “I am a part of all I have read.”

Sometimes I wonder about the authenticity of my memories. Barnes wrote, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” As we age, there are fewer people to document the certainty of our memories. Perhaps things were not as good nor as bad as we remember. Was my life at the jail with Blackie, Verdie and Paul, the Dancing Decorator, as terrific as I remember? Maybe it’s all about how we interpret those events, which may change as we age.

As we change, easing into middle age, Barnes wrote that “Middle aged man contends with a past he never thought much about.” Mindlessly, most of us plod through our daily lives not identifying causes and effects. Barnes writes “Every day is Sunday.” Boredom goes on from generation to generation. We tend to live years of stagnancy, waiting for our lives to begin. How many of us are still waiting for moments of inspiration, hoping to find a new passion, wanting more excitement in our lives?

More changes come as we enter dreaded old age. Our fears compound. We might not be as independent; we may need the services provided by a nursing home. We don’t like being old where there is often too much over-familiarity. We still want to be viewed as a dignified person, a person of value…who wants to be invisible?

When we’re young we invent different futures for ourselves; but when we’re old, we invent different pasts. As a teen, many feel we can be anyone we want to be. We might have dreamed of being a movie star, some wildly successful, important person. But life became real: job hunting, marriage, kids and paying bills became our day-to-day existence. Maybe that’s the time when the worlds in books entered our lives, giving us a means of escaping from our “Sunday” lives to a life filled with excitement.

Barnes has me thinking: time first grounds us, then confounds us. Am I being realistic to settle for safety, avoiding change, not facing certain things I want to avoid?

Most of us are average. We have to reconcile that life may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Our youthful idealism, those pie-in-the-sky dreams of who we could be, are rarely achieved. We may never be the person we wished to be, but we’re always changing, and the way we live does affect others. We make impressions on those around us. If not now, when will you and I begin to fully live?

Springtime brings changes: new life in nature; renewed energy and ideas in us. Like Minnesota’s changing seasons, books bring interesting people, other worlds, new ideas, wonder and joy into my life.

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”  ~Kathleen Norris

“A house without books is a room without a soul.”  ~Marcus Tullius Cicero”

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.