Nostalgia

Zeke: "Me baby!"

Nostalgia

A few weeks ago, Ryan's mom was in town and we went to the Stanford pool to squeeze in a last swim while it was still summer hours and the afternoons were still hot. At one point I was swimming laps while Mom was watching Zeke, and as I approached the far end of the pool, Zeke's back was toward me. Something about the way he was standing - the slight angle, the relaxed stance, gave me a glimpse of what Zeke might look like in a teenage boy's body, and my heart clenched a little.  I was reminded of how fleeting his little-ness is, how unrelentingly quickly the days will fly by until he will be the one with the bigger and stronger body, until he will even more his own person than he is now.

All of parenthood is nostalgia, I suppose.

 How many evenings I spend now while absent-mindedly playing or reading with Zeke with half my head reminiscing over the yonder years when I had evenings and weekends open before me like blank sketchbooks, when I pursued hobbies or lazed and had perfect autonomy over my time, rolling in it without even realizing it was a finite stage.

And then there are those moments when I see old pictures of Zeke in his first year, and I realize I can hardly remember what it felt like to hold him when he was that small, or what his voice sounded like... and I have this urge to bottle to everything up, just in case.

(The irony is that nostalgia takes me away from the present, making it harder to have concrete memories about it later on, reinforcing a vicious cycle of wistfulness.)

I am comforted by Beth Ann Fennelly's words:
"Sometimes when Claire passes out of one or another of her cute stages and I Get anxious about her getting older, I think of the waiter in London's Chinatown and grow calm again.

We'd just come out of a long matinee at the theatre, and we were very hungry, and I was three months pregnant. We wandered among the crowded neon joints, then chose a restaurant down an alley, behind the main drag. The restaurant's sign wasn't translated into English. We pulled open the oversized red door and stepped inside. It was dark, and there were no customers. We would have turned around and slipped back into the fading day, but already the smiling, bowing waiter was gesturing toward a russet banquette where we should sit. We couldn't read the menu, and the solicitous waiter could tell. "I bring?" he asked, and we nodded.

After a few minutes, the waiter brought the first dish. As he set it down steaming on the table, he promised "more coming," and disappeared. Who knows what it was called, pork and fried scallions in a tangy sauce, unbelievably delicious. He came back after another few minutes, picked up the empty plate, and set down a new dish of something marvelous, promising again "more coming." I think he was concerned that we'd fill up before we'd sampled all the piquant riches he could ferry from the kitchen doorway, masked by prodigious greenery. As he removed each empty plate, I felt a pang thinking I'd never know what the dish was called or perhaps even eat it again - but suddenly there would be an intriguing new dish in front of me, bathing my face in steam. No worry, he told us. More coming. More coming."

And isn't it the same way with our lives, our walks with the Lord? We are so easily satisfied with the here and now. My frame is so small that I hardly look forward to eternity. When I'm in a "good spot," I just want it to save it, to make it last.

But we are invited to go deeper in and further up!

"More coming. More coming."

Non-complacency in the good times, and hope during the bad!