I had the pleasure of attending a presentation this morning on the progress of a written history of the village of Tyne Valley. My friend Carolyn McKillop, who grew up in Tyne Valley, has been doing research for years, and has amassed a jaw-dropping collection of photographs and information. It was a nerdy delight to see her incredibly well-organized records.
She has joined forces with Gary MacDougall, another Tyne Valley native and former editor of The Guardian, Charlottetown’s daily newspaper. The meeting was as well organized as Carolyn’s research, and both of them gave an excellent overview on what they have accomplished.
Item Five on the agenda, “Dreaming of time”, had Gary’s name next to it. He said he had been thinking a lot about time recently, perhaps because he is getting older. He admitted what he was going to say might sound a bit “out there”, but he went on anyway, as he was amongst family and friends, and said he feels that the people and events from the past are still here with us somehow. He called it the Cosmic Filing Cabinet, how the memories and events of the past are just filed away, waiting there for us to discover them. In the midst of a meeting of the practicalities of creating a community history, he offered a short, beautifully poetic aside about trying to understand his place in time.
Now, Gary is my second cousin, so perhaps there is some genetic resonance at play here, but I’ve also been thinking about time a lot as well, and in a similar way. I find myself time travelling, almost forgetting that those I love who are no longer physically here actually are. I’m not seeing ghosts, nor am I lost or having delusions (I hope!). Time is bending, and I find myself pulled from it, suspended and observing it, and then dropping back down into the stream of time.
It started one winter night a couple of years ago while I was driving home from another meeting in Tyne Valley, as it happens. Warm light was glowing through house windows, and it struck me that the light I was seeing was more or less the same kind of light I would have seen 50 years ago when I was a child being driven along the same road. The houses had memories, were doing the same things as they always had, looked the same way. Different people inside, in most cases, but that wasn’t evident from the road. It could be 50 years ago, it could be now, it could be 75 years in the future. Time didn’t matter.
I passed a house that had belonged to one of my great-uncles and pictured him sitting inside it watching television. I passed the store and house that had belonged to my parents and could see them in both, quick flashes of them as young people. Then our immediate neighbours doing their evening chores in their barns and kitchens. There were no figures in the windows, but the light was timeless and transported me away.
If I’m feeling out of sorts, discouraged or overwhelmed, I have learned to open what I guess I’ll have to start calling my Cosmic Filing Cabinet and pull out a good, warm memory. I can put myself back in my childhood bedroom, all Barbie pink and filled with stuffed toys, my ginger cat asleep at the foot of my bed, listening to adults murmuring and laughing in the living room after a dinner party. I know where every light switch is in that house, what was in every drawer, how the basement smelled, what could be seen from every window. I can go back and be there and find the security and comfort I was so fortunate to have as a child, no worries or concerns.
As Gary said, a human lifetime is but a blip in the history of the universe, but it matters. We are creatures who are bedevilled by the knowledge that our time is limited, but who look for meaning in spite of that knowledge. We just need the key for that filing cabinet.
