Past Present and Future

I'm curious. I've been thinking a lot about the past lately as I work out ideas for a new piece I'm writing. It occurred to me that a preoccupation with the past could also be because the future is uncertain.

At times in life I haven't give the past much thought. Most of the time when I have delved into the past it was because of something that went wrong. Some trauma or trouble that I was facing in life that seemed to have roots in the past. Then I turned my thoughts to excavating past actions, plans, and relationships to uncover where the trouble began and how I might go about "fixing" the problem. When everything was going well, my thoughts were always on the future. Where I wanted to be or what I hoped to accomplish. I didn't have time to think about the past.

When I visit with my father and he starts to look more frail with age I can't help but thinking about the past. About the times that we threw the football out in the backyard as I was trying out for the youth football league. Times when we went deer hunting in Northern Wisconsin or Pheasant hunting in South Dakota. I was just a kid but I remember the late night poker games for nickels and dimes in the northern Wisconsin cabin with two feet of snow outside the door. I remember the farmers daughter in South Dakota and sharing my writing with her about my dreams for what I wanted to accomplish. Playing pool in the local tavern with my brother drinking cokes on a Sunday afternoon while my dad sat at the bar and watched the football games with friends.

At the family retreat weekend that I attended last weekend, all of the adults sat under the front canopy of the inn and talked and kicked back. I spent some time there too but found myself dragged off by my daughter and her young friend who were bored. I finally said okay go ide and I'll count to 20 in a game of hide and seek. I felt a little silly counting to 20 out loud but I have enough theatre ego to let go of the adult and enjoy the "kid" in me as well. My daughter is very good at hiding and is almost never found. I'm wandering out calling to Jade to and Jamie to come out and thinking how much part of me wants to be sitting under that front canopy drinking a beer. But then I think about how my daughter will remember me when I'm almost 80 years old like my father. Will she remember this weekend retreat when we went out in the canoe, roasted marshmellows by the fire and we played hide and seek?

As we enter parts of our lives that seem somehow less promising because of age and physical agility will I think more about those days of my youth- my childhood, high school, or college days, or should I focus more about being where I am right now. I've reached an age where I've accomplished some things in life and yet I feel like there is more left I want to do. I think that we have moments of transition. I seem to be in one of those at the present. I'm reminded of the book Passages that I read many years ago. Part of me is still striving to accomplish certain things in life. Part of me wants to take more time to enjoy the simple pleasures that life brings. A warm summer afternoon with a slight breeze and a nap out on the patio. My daughter doesn't let me rest for long. She is in continual motion and I struggle between trying to teach her that I am not her "entertainment" when she is bored and yet doing something that makes memories she will turn to when I become my fathers age. As my father struggles with his Alzheimer's disease he seems to be lost sometimes. Just staring into space. He can tell me a story with exact detail of when he was a kid...or a story about when I was a kid and he and I did something, yet he can't remember that I came to visit him the day before.

I never thought about most of this stuff when I was younger. I was always focused on the future. But now it seems I'm caught between remembering the past and creating a future for myself and one that can be remembered by my daughter. Creating moments with my father that he won't remember but that I will. What will my daughter remember from the summer of 2009. Maybe playing hide and seek with her father on a cool summer night...