Upon Those Who Step Into The Same Rivers, Different Waters Flow
Reflections on a childhood spent on the Ship of Theseus
Since leaving Cape Cod over the weekend I’ve been back in Fayetteville, NY, where I grew up and where my parents still live.
My parents live just shy of two miles apart and I am lucky enough to have a bedroom in each of their houses that is still well preserved from the days when I occupied them full-time. A few items rearranged here or there, a little more of the room dedicated to storage, one or two of the old posters taken down—but otherwise more or less a time capsule of the me that existed from ages 0-18.
Who is that, really? That person feels more and more distant with each passing year, and while I imagine that is both the norm and expectation, it is still jarring to experience that version of me slipping just out of reach every time I try to stare at him for too long. Like a ghost, maybe, or the Ship of Theseus. Is there some old me that is gone, and a new me that exists definitively in the present, and a clear demarcation between the two? Does a new version of me get born every day, the old version dying in my sleep? And if so, who am I, really? (Heraclitus came closest, I think, in answering the paradox with one of his own: Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and ever different waters flow.)
When I’m back home—at this home, the town where I grew up—a favorite pastime of mine is to spend a good chunk of time just rooting around in all the drawers and boxes and bookcases to see what I turn up. Old photos and CDs and checklists and school notebooks. Painfully earnest and formal essays and research papers. Newspaper clippings, baseball cards, Boy Scout paraphernalia. The old me, those other versions, seem closer in these moments as I put my hands on those relics of the lives I’ve led. (Earlier this week my visiting aunt brought my dad a silver mug that was given to their late father on the occasion of his birth in 1910. “I wonder if he ever drank out of this,” my dad mused. In the moment it gave me a shudder. The idea of putting your hands on something touched by someone you loved who is long gone from this world.)
Purposeless digging is certainly fun but on my last few trips home I’ve had a project in mind as I go, albeit one that I get distracted from every thirty seconds. A pair of CDs I bought in high school and would very much like to listen to again—recorded by local musician and current Syracuse city councilman Joe Driscoll—have so far eluded me. (They’re not available streaming anywhere, either, which is a crying shame.) I’ve exhausted all the places where they might logically be, but the idea that they might be somewhere illogical, or actually in a drawer in my younger brother’s room, or buried in a pile of high school volleyball stat sheets, keeps me soldiering on. There’s always another box.
I read The Satanic Verses almost a decade ago but one line has stuck with me.
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
When I return home I am surrounded by all the ghosts of my past lives. By their very nature they are tethered to this place, and I am not, and every time I leave I forget for a while that they exist. But leaving creates more of them to return to, a truth which I have learned to cherish rather than dread. I hope you all have some place to return to that makes you feel the same way.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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