They’re dying off, the people who’ve known me all the way back to my infancy, the people who can tell me new stories about myself, sometimes stories I don’t want to hear. The other week, my oldest cousin embarrassed me with one at a dinner table full of guests.
A dozen years older than I am, he recalled that from the start, I had a headful of hair and eyes that watched everything.
All fun to hear, but then he went on.
One day, as he told it, I was playing with a bunch of my boy cousins. Apparently, nature called, but, not wanting to interrupt their play, the boys unzipped and took a leak. Undaunted, I dropped my drawers, stepped out of them, and did my own business.
Unlike my oldest cousin, most people who know me now have seen only an abridged version of my life, like they started reading a book in the middle. They can’t tell me my early experiences, the ones I’ve lost to childhood amnesia.
On the other hand, the number of people I’ve known from a young age keeps expanding. I sometimes look at these people—my children and grandchildren, younger siblings, now-grown up students, who run city departments and research climate change and work hospital jobs—with some astonishment. They’ve morphed into something bigger and better, like they’ve grown into the clothes they were meant to wear.
Perhaps my sense of humor is aging right along with me. Because, while I decline from my peak as others reach the heights of theirs, I sometimes take a contrary delight in remembering back—a runny nose, a wet bottom, a failed middle school romance, a joke that went flat, a bad haircut for picture day, a detention for being late.
I don’t go around telling these stories. I just keep them as a playful amusement, a way to help me marvel at what these matured people can do and who they have become.
Besides, it gives me a lift to think that, although they are so valued and relied on by others and have more insight that I do in so many ways, that just maybe, in some small ways, I understand them better than they understand themselves.
Apple to Apple 