Life's Story

The facial wrinkles were shared by the newborn and the nonagenarian as they forged a delicate alliance in which they studied each other in the attempt to comprehend the life that was to come and the life that had been lived. The infant wanted to absorb the life that stood before it with all of its tonal complexities, but its mind still in its simplistic state had the structures but not the tools to understand. Yet, the elder attempted to meld his mind through the infant’s piercing eyes so that his story would be passed to this next generation.

His story was one of passages from the shadowing beginnings of his birth onto the sweet ship of his youth, through the perilous tumultuous times of adulthood in which the balmy calm always gave way to the dark waters of the storm driven seas, and finally, as a survivor of life, accomplished through the social compact under which he lived, through the learned lessons of reconciliation, restraint and diplomacy, and of cooperation and mutual respect.

He ached to translate his life and vision with a luminous clarity and coherency, to share his intellectual and moral standards, to tell of his migrations and exiles, to describe the scenes and shenanigans, to warn of the darkness lurking at the fringes and the light awaiting over the horizon, to share the times of isolated disarray and acrimony, and the times of elaborate ideals and experiments in utopia.

He prayed for the time and ability to shape the emotional swirls of the infant into complex inner contours, to play a pivotal role, to assist the infant in comprehending the mixtures of experiences that awaited, the sharing and the bickering, the predictable and the shocking, the bountiful and the famine, the exciting and the tedious, the shared praised and malicious gossip, the knowing and the doubt, the respectful and the irreverent, the peacefully complete and the notoriously factious, the aloneness and the oneness.

He hoped to tell of a life well lived rather than squandered, being a loner and a part of the flock, periods of linear progressions and periods of fragmentation, ideals discovered and ideals lost, ideological coherency and incoherency, a steady path and watershed moments, the concrete and the symbolic, the feverish and the temperate, the evolution and revolutions.

His profound desire was to be a gifted storyteller, but as hard as he tried to will his life stories into the infant, the stories remained within, and so it was that the infant would have to learn the lessons of life through living.

Inspired by a family event at which there was a newborn and a 91 year old; the rest is just my imagination. In addition, in an effort to experiment with writing and expand my writing vocabulary, I wrote down words and phrases from the book I currently am reading, Promised Land, and specifically, its first chapter on The Plymouth Plantation.