On Ten Year Anniversaries
I’ve been dreading this summer for nine years.
Not dreading, I suppose. Looking forward to it as one who uses a candle to look for a leak in the gas pipe, to steal from P.G. Wodehouse.
The summer of 2007 marked the arbitrary beginning of Matthew Eley as I know him. I suspect we all have epochs like this in life, lasting months or weeks and on which we look back as classicists do the final years of the Roman Republic, forgetting the teenage angst and assassinations (respectively). We savor only the beautiful knowledge that a formative golden age, of which no one was aware, occurred.
As I said, for me it was June 2007. That winter, my father had had an accident which temporarily forced me to become the man of the house; hormones were at work making that mental change physical. Life found me in that strange period where five years before I had been losing teeth and five years later I would be indulging in mildly drunken escapades in college. Summer seemed to be the mountain range which divided the two watersheds.
It was a two-week debate camp at Patrick Henry College, a place so conservative that I doubt it would invite me back if its overseers read any of my published works. In between classes perfecting rhetorical skills (items which have long stood in the stead of actual, marketable knowledge), we ate voraciously in the dining room, savored our relative freedom at Harper’s Ferry on the headwaters of the Potomac (pictured), marveled at the life that must await at college and drank the Virginian summer air in deep draughts. Tyler burst into our room one night with an accomplice and Supersoaked us in an act of aggression which is still unavenged. In memory, each sunset was a Monet painting projected onto approaching thunder storms and distant green Appalachians; in reality, we stayed up until one discussing girls and pondering which features we might like best.
A year later the college brochures were rolling in, the strange, certain invitations to an unknown adventurous future, a bliss with which only Calvinists can properly identify. But even then, at the age of 16, I looked back at that summer as an important one in my personal history. Whenever June would slink around in all its humidity, I would always think back. One year, two years, three. Around four I decided that as long as that number did not exceed ten, I could consider myself close enough to that summer to still be young.
And here it is. The trope of “time flies” is more lazy than it is true (and it is only the last two years that have me worried about the years’ improving lap records). In fact it seems like it must have been longer than ten years. At least, I refuse to believe it only takes five of the last two years to place me once again there on the PHC campus, shorter and more gormless. But it is true.
We tend to associate events within the last year as being still in the now, as though being less distant makes them more accessible. In between one and two years, something odd happens; we say that two people have been together two years already, that happened two years ago already. Humans are surprised, after millennia of being subjected to time, at its passing.
Moments are precious things. If only because they will invariably become the past that we will long for, possibly the golden moment that we measure a whole decade by. But we’re never quite sure of it until after.
