Downs' Diary: What We've Lost

My book club is reading A Severe Mercy, a memoir by Sheldon Vanauken. The author describes going back to visit his boyhood home, called Glenmerle, after a decade of being away. Vanauken lived there through his early 20s until they lost the home after his father's death in WWII. That his home had a name should evoke a certain image of just how grand it was. Here are some excerpts about Glenmerle and his childhood:

"On either side beyond the poplars lay the gate meadows where the wild strawberries grew. An image leaped into his mind of a sunny white tablecloth and a blue and white bowl heaped with small exquisite red strawberries and flaky shortcake in the thick yellow Jersey cream from the near-by farm..."

The gardner’s grandson was his playmate when he was a child. They swum and fished the stream with bent pins and prowled the woods. They snuck out at night to pinch watermelons from the farmer—stolen watermelons are sweeter—and brought them back where, on top of the haystack beside the cabin, they would eat the dripping hearts while bats flitted across the sky...

"He remembered as though it were but a few days ago that winter night, himself too young even to know the meaning of beauty, when he had looked up at a delicate tracery of bare black branches against the icy glittering stars: suddenly something that was, all at once, pain and longing and adoring had welled up in him, almost choking him. He had wanted to tell someone, but he had no words, inarticulate in the pain and glory. It was long afterwards that he realized that it had been his first aesthetic experience. That nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty. Even now, for him, ‘bare branches against the stars’ was a synonym for beauty."

Vanauken's description of his childhood and the places and the memories that shaped him left me melancholy for two reasons.

First, as a military family we never live anywhere long enough for the boys to collect memories of “that one special place” that will mean everything to them looking back as adults. For me, that place was (and remains) the lake in North Carolina where I spent summers visiting my grandparents (and now my parents). There’s something about the continuity of not just people, but a place, that anchors a soul.

The second thing that struck me was what we’ve lost in the name of progress. The author’s descriptions of his life reveal an un-hurriedness, an ease to living, where time was “wasted” by our standards; reading, fishing, "prowling" the woods or skipping rocks on a pond. Family gatherings, an encounter with nature, a good meal or just a bowl of fresh strawberries were commonplace and yet they nourished his spirit and, over time, defined him.

In contrast, I think about the settings and the "scheduled-ness" of our lives, where children rarely spend a whole day playing in the woods, certainly not unsupervised. Instead they have play dates at parks where they climb jungle gyms, not trees. An hour or so later, we cart them off to the next thing, soccer or tae kwondo or a fast food dinner eaten far too quickly even by fast food standards. Our time with extended family is precious but infrequent, and I fear that the memories, so few, will fade from, rather than imprint onto their hearts.

Mike exposes our boys to beauty and nature and talks to them frequently about the wonder of the creation. But when they are surrounded by strip malls and suburbs and traffic and high rises and schedules that keep them jumping from one thing to the next, I wonder what they will remember most—the 3 hour hikes we squeezed in on Saturday afternoons or the frenetic pace of their everyday lives? I wonder if we have given them enough space in their schedules and quiet time in nature so that they will one day be struck by beauty in a way that stops their heart and creates longing and passion?

Much about the places and pace of our lives cannot be changed. We are committed to the military, so continuity in one place is not in the cards for us. Many of the demands of our schedule cannot be avoided, but some of it is a choice. I want to be more intentional about how we spend our time and keep "the main things, the main things.”

I also want to be honest about the trade-offs we have embraced as a society. We've exchanged Glenmerle for a virtual reality life lived through an avatar in a video game or on the internet, a relentless 24/7 news cycle where all that's wrong in the world gets played out before our eyes, Blackberrys (not the kind you eat), text-messages, celebutantes, cell phones we won't put down, fast cars, fat bodies, and STRESS. It was a devil's bargain and it can be called many things but progress isn't one of them. I don't want to romanticize days gone by too much. I know each age has it's pitfalls. It just seems that we have lost so very much...

The pictures in this post are from the year we spent in Newport, RI while Mike was attending the Naval War College. They remind me of Vanauken's description of Glenmerle. Newport is stunning in every season and that year we rented a cottage right on the beach. The picture above is our front yard. We encountered nature in all its splendor every day during our year there. Our boys played on the beach most days and our dining room table offered a better view than any restaurant in town. Our schedule was more relaxed because Mike was in school and we had time to waste, walking on the beach mostly, and waste it we did. We hosted parties, often, with our military friends, who become our family, when biological family is hard to come by. However fleeting, one thing I know for certain, the Downs' boys will remember Newport.

I don’t know how to recreate that time, but I’m glad we had it.