In search of lost time

My oldest friend's father (a close friend of my father's) died last week after being ill for some time and suffering from dementia. Over the past several years, most of my father's close friends have died. It has been an achingly sad experience for my father, of course, but also for me, because with each death, a childhood experience of mine seemed to die. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are even real. Unless the memory is a shared one (as with my brother) I have no way of knowing if things actually happened as I recall them, or if indeed they happened at all. With each death, I also cling hopelessly to those who are still living, like my aunt Joan and Uncle Buddy who are my role models for how a life ought to be lived. Or Irv and Phyllis, my father's oldest surviving friends, who at 90 and 91 are still hanging on to life, and not tenuously: they are active in a senior citizens" choir, and most importantly, they still have each other. I know that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when I will have to bid goodbye to my father and my relatives in their 80's and beyond. Nothing prepares us for death, it sneaks up on us unawares, leaving us full of regrets for not having seen the person just once more to say goodbye, because last time you saw them, you didn't know it WAS goodbye.

A year ago last winter, my beloved piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, became ill with a fast-moving and deadly cancer; he was dead in a matter of weeks. Even now after the passing of time, I am still inconsolable. He was the first musician/teacher to take me seriously, without sexism, and lead me down the path of playing jazz. Without him, I might not have become a musician at all. I was young when I studied with him, and like all of his young students at the time, I regarded him as a spiritual as well as a musical leader, even though he did not espouse any religion (at least not in lessons.)
He was a remarkable man by any standard, a prodigy who gave up performing to teach, who slept only 4 hours a night and practiced 14 hours a day. He made you work harder than you thought possible. He dispensed wisdom modestly. He always greeted you with a smile and a joke, and would end the lesson by shaking his fist and saying "Burn!" I can still see him in my mind's eye. I feel that his presence is still with me, inspiring me, to this day. Of course it's completely unscientific, and I could not explain how I know this, but I often speak to him, and I believe that he hears. I recently downloaded two photos of him from the internet, printed them and put them up in my piano room to inspire me to get back to practicing and to take advantage of the extra time I have now not teaching.

The times and places I remember have changed, just as in the Beatles song "In My Life."
The landscape of the college town I grew up near, where my father taught, is unrecognizable when I refer to the mental picture of what it looked like in say, 1969.
The Pizza House and Campus Restaurant are long gone, as are Waring's, the Hoot, the Disc, Phil's Record and Radio, Singer's bookstore, and the College Theater where I saw The Sound of Music, The Graduate, Dirty Harry, and Easy Rider. My high school had a facelift many years ago, and is now larger and more expansive than it was when I attended it. More often than not, when I am driving through Storrs on the main drag, it seems like a dreamscape to me. Did I really grow up here? Is there an accurate picture in my mind of what it used to be? Did I really cut class to read tarot cards in the basement Campus Restaurant, where the pizza was terrible and the air redolent of marijuana? Did I really write bad poetry for the high school literary mag pretentiously entitled VIRTU (with an accent over the "u")? I submitted some nice drawings, I think. Did I really roam the halls of school in a black hat and cape from the Portobello Road flea market in London? I seem to recall a crew-cutted gym teacher
snarling at me that this wasn't Halloween. Did we girls really have sadistic female gym teachers? And what is it about gym teachers anyway? I have nightmares to this day that I was not allowed to graduate from high school because I had not satisfied the gym requirement. In the dream, I failed to show up for gym all year long even though I knew what would happen to me. In reality, I dragged myself to the hated gymnasium, put on the awful bright red one-piece uniform with the bloomers that didn't look good on anyone, even the thin girls, and made a pretense of playing whatever game we had to play that week. I sprained my precious piano-playing fingers playing volleyball and basketball. I was always in the outfield in softball, so clumsy was I with my lack of eye-hand coordination. No one wanted me on their team. I came in almost last in the cross-country (1/4 mile run which seemed endless) Ah, the humiliation! That memory must be accurate. We never forget our humiliations--they appear to be larger than our triumphs.

I also suffered humiliation in math class and in Modern European History (which I alone of all my friends had to drop) but let us not dwell on this pain. I did not have anywhere near perfect grades, so it's a mystery that I got into Wellesley and Vassar and was waitlisted at Brown (the women's college was then called "Pembroke")
It wasn't good enough for me because Yale and Wesleyan turned me down but accepted two of my female classmates. Disappointment. And the resultant self-flagellation because of course it was ALL MY FAULT for not working harder, cutting class, doing drugs, etc.
I fancied myself a rebel but in reality my attempts at rebellion were feeble. My brother, two years younger, was much more daring, and rebelled to the extent that he almost flunked out of high school, something I would never have dared to attempt.
I was just a little too young to be part of the hippie and yippie movements, and I missed out on Woodstock because--are you ready for this? I was too cowardly to run away with my friends who were going, because my parents forbade me. A good little girl to the last. If I had known that Woodstock was going to be the biggest pop culture phenomenon in history, I might have gone at 15. When my friends all came home with bronchitis and pneumonia, my mother said triumphantly: "You see?" But I would have risked sickness if I had known. I had to be satisfied with the movie.

Lost time, lost time--one day, today will have spun as far into the past as 1969.
In 40 years, I will be 98 if I am still living. Then I will be trying to remember what is happening now, and wondering if it really happened. And there may be no one else left to ask.