Past Life

Like indelible ink, your parents leave a permanent impression on your being. You grow up, get married, have a career, even have children yourself but the impression they made on you never really washes out, still visible on your skin like a faint laundry mark on a favorite old shirt.

I came up with this image as I was walking home from the gym in Casco on a spectacularly beautiful Maine day and because I had just finished reading John Updike’s last collection of short stories, “My Father’s Tears.” Most of them written when Updike was in his 70’s and set in the present day, they are full of references to and reminisces of his childhood, his parents, even the topography of his growing up. They are elegiac in tone—an old man looking back—but consciously detailed even sensuous in their description of his past world and the way it weaves in and out of his present.

The power of the past to affect me even now in my 60’s, a grown woman married over 40 years, mother of two adult children, amazes me. In my dream life, I often revisit Yeadon, the town I grew up in; I walk all through my house, look out the windows of my bedroom and if I’m lucky, every once in while (oh, how I wish this happened more often), I see my parents—still youthful and powerful and beautiful, before aging and death left me without them.