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We oldies who retain our memories are blessed.
Memory is the continuity of consciousness that is the very essence
of life. Without consciousness we do not exist. And the more we
remember the stronger our consciousness.
It is nice to reminisce, like re-reading a
friendly book. Our unwritten memoirs. When we remember it's not just
impersonal abstractions. Faces and places appear on our inner
screen. Friends and kinfolk, even strangers long forgot. They are
eternally fresh on the template of memory.
My high school friends (some of whom I still
correspond with occasionally) are still youthful, despite what
our re-union pictures show. Those Allegheny hills and dales are in
tune with a different time sequence so their trees still whisper in
the wind and their blossoms are still jubilant in spring. The
surface has been re-arranged a little, but the stage is essentially
the same. The clover is not as full of bees and I don't see many
frogs these days, but I feel privileged to have known all these
things and retained the memory thereof up to my 83rd birthday.
As it is written in Ecclesiastes, "there is a
time for everything under the sun, a time for reaping and a time for
sowing." When my time comes, let me close the book with a sigh of
satisfaction and not regret.
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