Aging Like A Fine Wine

As you age it becomes increasingly difficult to segregate moments of time.  Our memories can recall events yet trying to reconcile the event with age can be problematic at best.  I find that if I start with an event I can build a recollection however, if I was to start with an age, say what happened to me when I was 8 years old, it is nearly impossible to construct.  There are times when I attempt to torture my mind by trying to rebuild a picture of not only an instant but everything that was around me.  Often times our only recollections are programmed around photographs that remind us and often reconstruct moments long forgotten.  

When does this happen in life?  How old are we when our minds transition to a point of fogginess with incidental clarity?  I have recently taken interest in period television that reconstructs the past.  My past.  I drift away from the story to analyze the environments and try to recall if it was the same as I remembered.  Sometimes when I watch a period film from the 20’s or 30’s I marvel at how we lived in a world devoid of plastic.  There were some hard forms but somehow we survived.  We didn’t need it.  You would never think that now.

The other day I was working in my office and one of the young agents in my group brought up the Kennedy assassination.  He asked me if I remembered it.  I quickly responded “How the fuck old do you think I am?”  It made me recall a moment when our now grown son noted how my wife and I grew up with horses.  We still laugh at the memory.  It is a reminder of how all of our minds overlap.  Like the skins of an onion we go from a small center to an aging and brown outer layer.  At that point it doesn’t take much before we flake away.  

One of my bosses, a man actually two years my junior walked by today and asked the group who knew Meadowlark Lemon?  I peaked my head above the pod to say Harlem Globetrotters and whistle the accompanying tune.  When I grew up I watched him laugh and dance with a basketball.  I found him everywhere 
on television from game shows to sitcoms.  Meadowlarks name will soon be lost to time joining the likes of Buddy Hackett and Sid Caesar a generation before.  I suppose three hundred years ago things were much simpler.  You didn’t really know anyone outside your village and technology and the world seemed to change very little.  You just lived and died with the same memory.  Perhaps you recalled a good growing season or when you parent died.  

PS. This is not me.. I am not that old yet.

Age plays so many cruel tricks on us.  It changes our bodies into forms we scarcely recognize.  It robs us of the ones we loved and still love.  It modifies our daily existence and it changes our minds into compartmentalized vaults of moments in time.