Still Sundays

Forgive and do Forget. Robert-Robert Frost: one question you should keep close.

October 17th.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

There is a stillness that belongs only to the sky. It’s the stillness in between latitudes and longitudes. We can only know it from afar.

This Sunday I am sipping tea in a suburb somewhere outside Nashville, Tennessee, visiting my sister and her fiance who moved here recently for a short project. They were on a break for a week so we all flew in from the East and West coasts to visit them.

We are the Peter Pan Household. Our father couldn’t join us as he had to finish a project but my brother and sister-in-law are here from LA, as is my other brother, Zain, from Berkeley, and of course our mother is here.

We don’t always get along, we disagree, we argue, we question, we challenge, we respect, we apologize, we do it all over again. All four of us are very close, equally intense, unabashedly introspective, happily reflective, uncannily intuitive, indulge in a dry sense of humor, and share an affinity and respect for being alive. We love a lot and laugh sincerely. We are unconventional in every sense of the word.

What distinguishes us the most is the value repeatedly instilled in us by our parents: forgive and forget.  We were taught the opposite of forgive and don’t forget. True forgiveness lies in forgetting. Completely. This doesn’t have to come at the expense of lesson learned.  Just to sincerely move on with an empty heart without the memory and the agony, ready for a new memory, having grown from the past. It doesn’t always happen instantaneously and it is a group effort. Life moves forward. What good is forgiveness if you haven’t?

I met a man named Robert on my flight and his countenance resembled Robert Frost. He was 72 years old, handsome and aware of both facts. It was just a glance that brought us together for a cherished conversation. I thought he looked like Robert Frost and he thought I was reading Frost. I made him take out his driver’s license to prove his name was indeed Robert.

I “tweeted” this wild synchronicity on Twitter before I had to turn my phone off. After landing I switched my phone on to learn there were a few people on Twitter who were curious as to what we talked about, who he was, ‘what it might mean.’

So here I am. I sit this morning with the opportunity to share the encounter, moving for all intents and purposes. I can begin by describing his electric blue eyes and the translucent speck of gold resting on the left eye. I can offer insights as to what it means for my personal journey as it concerns writing.  I can provide some wisdom shared by him. I can make up a happy story. I can create a glorious version of the facts, even if melancholic, leaving us with hope. I can draft pieces of his memories in a short story. I can sketch a non-fiction piece honoring what he shared with me and tuck it in as a chapter of Nectar of the Ordinary™.

The aforementioned are the ways I want to, and can, preserve the set of fleeting moments that neither one of us will forget. For me it might be followed—but not replaced—by another such encounter. I wish I could say the same for him, given what he shared with me.

For now all I want to share is the following by him:

When you get to my age—with most of your loved ones gone, a forty year marriage that has made you feel more alone for the last twenty years than you were before you ever got married, and a stranger like you is the only authentic conversation one has had despite yapping away with many—you don’t want to wonder why am I still alive? What is my purpose? There’s got to be one, right? I wish I kept that question close sooner and all along.

Even if one’s purpose is just ‘being,’ like the sky, best to take note of the sky once a day.

It is Sunday and there are colors brimming from Tennessee trees that we are going to dance under.

There is much to share.

But.

I am being summoned to get ready. Family has been “patient long enough.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Robert Frost

~a.q.s.

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