the moments that shape us
As author Niall Williams writes in his novel, “This is Happiness,” “The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end.”
I spent this past weekend, enjoying the stories—visual, not written—of Norman Rockwell in the Berkshire museum dedicated to not only his legendary illustrations that adorned the Saturday Evening Post but also to illustrations of his and others capturing 250 years of American history. The exhibit, American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell, is well worth the trip to western Massachusetts, particularly during the weeks of majesty ahead when New England’s leaves turn all shades of yellow, orange and red. I was joined by two friends with whom I’ve shared adventures for more than 50 years; we met at Haverford College in Philadelphia.
The narrator in Williams’ book is not only steeped in story but in the moment. And it strikes me increasingly that it is moments rather than long-drawn memories that stand out in our mind, even shape who we are. The images of art, like Rockwell’s boy sitting beside a policeman at a lunch counter, provide some of those moments, shape our vision of the past, fixe it in time. But more personally so, too, do life experiences, transient, fleeting, and yet with extraordinary staying power. They beckon at unexpected times.
As a small child, I remember trying to outrun a car, its brakes screeching, bearing down on me. I’d run into the street in Elmhurst, Queens, to get a clearer view of a fire truck down the block. I ran two steps before sprawling on the street, knees and elbows skinned, the car’s big front bumper seemingly inches away. A woman, a neighbor, picked me up, took me to the sidewalk across from our apartment, gave me a candy bar.
It wouldn’t be life’s last near miss, just the most clearly etched in my memory. Or what I think is my memory.
Fast forward 25 years and, Kathy and I wandered through a neighborhood of earthen floored huts in 1979 Cusco, Peru. First in the background, then closer, we heard the melody of El Condor Pasa, sometimes referred to as Peru’s second national anthem and made famous by Simon and Garfunkel. It was being plucked on a harp, beautifully, by an old man in a serape sitting in the darkened doorway of one of those huts.
A few years later, sitting in a high-ceilinged office in the Maryland State House, the oldest capitol building in continuous use in this country, we heard a different sound, the rap of a knuckle on the stately window. We opened it and were handed an infant dressed in a white christening gown, swaddled in white blanket. This is how we met our older daughter, Betsy, adopted independently with the help of a doctor who also was a Maryland state legislator.
Moments. No more. Some little, some momentous. They shape us. In the end, they are us. “We all become stories in the end.”