looking back it was easy

It's been more than two years since I lost my last pair of glasses. I still suspect that the BF's former pug ate them, but no remnants of the lost metal frames ever materialized, so who knows? This week I finally got around to replacing them, an effort to give my eyes a break from constant contacts. The exam revealed that I've lost vision in both eyes, though it's a negligible change.

I picked up the new frames Wednesday morning. That night, I flew home for my grandmother's funeral. It was after 9pm when I finally made it to my parents' house, and I stayed up past midnight talking to my mother. Her mood was less frantic than I expected. She was still in the quiet phase, with long gaps of staring into space. We sat on the couch on talked about her side of the family, a conversation that prompted me to pull out the laptop and start recording some of this oral history before it was lost forever. By the end of the night I'd charted out a vague family tree going back four generations.

After the funeral the next day, a distant cousin took me on a walking tour of the old country cemetary where my grandmother's family is buried. She pointed out the grave of my great-grandmother's grandfather, a man named Andrew who fought in the Civil War. He was shot in Virginia then walked all the way home to Georgia, and lived a long life after. I'd never heard him mentioned before.

That night I showed my mother the new glasses, and we agreed that they reminded us of the ones my grandmother had when I was a child: thick, black plastic frames that sit on my prominant nose the same way hers did.

Back in NYC, all this talk of history has put me in documentation mode. I sat down last night and charted out a timeline of my life, starting with birth and listing all the major events that have happened year by year. I know what year I started middle school, but I can't nail down exactly when my mother's dad died. How old was I when my aunt left her husband and came to live with us? When did she move out? I remember my dad's surgery that almost killed him when I was 12 or 13, but which is it, 12 or 13?

I guess this is a component of getting older, a growing hunger to know about genealogy and also an effort to make sense of the greater story arc of your own life. Your eyesight starts to fail, your grandparents succomb to old age and then you realize you've got three decades worth of your own memories that are beginning to get hazy. There's a sense that some things can be misplaced and never found. You put your new glasses on, you stare intently at the blinking cursor on screen and wonder if any remnants of the things that were lost will ever materialize again.