Soon We Will All Be Gone.

Normally I’m a big enough optimist and I don’t think many people that know me would say that I was dismal or down or depressed. I’m not. I’m mostly facing the bright side of things and I try not to let a lot get to me. I say that as a preamble to mentioning this NPR story that does almost make me feel depressed. The high school I went to was, I’m pretty sure, the oldest West of the Mississippi River and it is just about one of the coolest buildings ever and it’s one of the schools that is on the list.

I can’t even stand the idea of the thing being torn down and just looking at pictures of it makes me feel nostalgic. The building had these old-school phones in each room that could be dialed out to other rooms. It served as a room-to-room intercom system and whenever we’d skip class and hang out in the attic upstairs we’d have somebody call us up there if we were missed.

My old high school in St. Louis

I’ve also been working on my genealogy a lot lately. [A lot.] Maybe that’s why I’m hyper-sensitive to this sort of thing right now. I’ve been really nostalgic for the past and at the same time it actually makes me feel a little bit less connected than I’d expected it would. I heard so many people say how that when they really started defining and determining their ancestry it would tend to make them feel more connected somehow. It sounded reasonable enough and I expected that the same might be true for me. It mostly wasn’t.

It’s just so goddam touching and sad and lonely reading some 3-inch obituary in some newspaper from 1849 that describes the life of someone I am somehow related to. The newspaper is as faded as these ancestors themselves and I’m learning that memories are like newspaper clippings sometimes. They are nice to have access to should you feel like you need some measure of the past to look back on but they get old and torn and you can forget about them entirely when they fade out of your view. This urge to gather together these moments is real enough for me and I do work hard enough at doing it and I often wonder what the real point of it is. I’m finding also that once I’ve collected these things I really don’t know what to do with them afterward. I can pack them back up into a box with a lid and label it and store it up there on the top shelf.

I’ve also got a stack of death certificates from members of my family. It’s this reminder that life is horribly short and that more often than not the things that you have done in that life will scarcely be remembered or they won’t matter much if they are. I guess that things obviously just die off or fade away and regardless of anything else I truly thought that I’d be used to that by now.

[This isn't me being depressed at all. This is just some admittedly sad observation and I've already begun reminding myself of the lovliness that happens almost constantly.]

Filed under Daily Notes, Notes and Writing | Tags: Genealogy, School, STL | Comment (0)