Nostalgia

Few people remember anything from their first years of life.

I look in the mirror; a 36-year-old father looks back. It’s easy to forget that I was once a baby, drooling and wide-eyed, blissfully unaware of the concept of a separate self.

My earliest memory is the faint image of sloped grass in a backyard that felt absolutely gigantic to my toddler eyes. That raw feeling of bigness is what’s left behind—a sense of wide open awe at the sheer immensity of the world.

Today, I am a walking memory of the child that once was and the lineage of all who came before me. I carry my orphaned great-grandfather, who moved through countless foster homes; I hold the dream of another great-grandfather who dug in Pennsylvania coal mines chasing a better life; I carry echoes of a family line that extends through Italian mountain villages.

Distance grows as time passes. Stories become embellished or forgotten. Thoughts, images, and details of the past are inevitably lost in the fray. Still, my body holds it all. Memory lives on in my diaphragm, my blood, my cells, my breath.

What escapes the mind flows onward in myriad ways: some subtle, and some that undoubtedly formed the defining characteristics of my identity.

I think of inheritance. What memory will I pass on to my grandchildren?

Look in the mirror. Who do you see?