On an otherwise empty bookshelf in my sparsely decorated apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, I used to have displayed (perhaps arranged is a better word) two or three rocks and a small piece of driftwood.
I don’t remember the significance of two of the rocks. I think they were picked up on a beach in San Diego (perhaps the same beach as the piece of driftwood) – or maybe one came from Asbury Park. The third rock, the small, smooth, black rock was given to me by a woman I was dating. We had gotten into an argument and broke up just before we were scheduled to take a trip to visit her family in San Diego. She left. I stayed behind, though not by choice. When she came back, I picked her up at the airport, and we had a heartfelt reunion at Jerry’s Bar in Philadelphia. We got back together and promised not to do that to each other again. One day at my place, she handed me the small rock. She said she had picked it up while walking on the beach on that trip that we were supposed to take together. She said she had picked up two rocks that day. One rock represented her past and she tossed that one into the ocean. The other rock represented her future and she gave that one to me. It was a sweet and touching gesture at the time. Experience and/or wisdom has since taught me that a more appropriate and credible gesture might have been to bring both rocks back – to offer up both parts of her self… for us to accept and understand that in any honest relationship we would do well to honor the past, present, and future in all their iterations and revisions.
The small piece of driftwood is something I picked up when we finally took that trip together a few months later. We were walking along the beach with her family. We had gotten engaged earlier that morning. Or at least I think that was the timeline – maybe the beach and the driftwood was the day after or the day before. I didn’t write the date on the piece of driftwood until sometime after the relationship ended. I remember feeling guilty about writing on it – permanent marker, somehow defacing or despoiling it with something as crass as a date that was anything but permanent – like all of those worn out initials etched in hearts on gnarled tree trunks.
Those objects stayed on display in my apartment for almost the entire year that I lived in Memphis. Then, about a month or two before I moved back to Pennsylvania, I was walking along the Mississippi River and had wanted to have my own tossing of the past / commitment to the future moment. I can’t remember if I tossed a rock into the river or if by then I had gained any deep perspective about not tossing away one’s past, but I know I picked up and kept a sandy-white colored smooth stone for myself. When I moved again, only the rock she had given me and the rock I kept from Memphis came out of the box of keepsakes from that relationship. The rock that represented the future that was promised to me and the rock that represented the future I had hoped to give myself. Still enamored with symbolic gestures, I usually arranged the rocks on the corner of a small cabinet next to a big plant with the new rock leaning up against, and slightly on top of, the old rock.
All of that was a long time ago. The sandy-white rock and the onyx-black rock are in a shoebox in a closet. So is the piece of driftwood along with some cards and photos. But the date remains – alongside a handful of other anniversaries (the day I met my first wife, my first engagement, my wedding day, the day I met the woman who gave me the rock, my second engagement). I have no desire to erase them, or re-write them, or do anything other than recognize them for the significance they held in the moment. Which seems like the true value for memories that are no longer shared experiences – guideposts for where one has been and how far one has come – snapshots of the life one lived or thought one would live. Pleasant reminders of past aspirations against which one can measure current circumstances.
Now, the rocks and things on display in my apartment are all (or mostly all) from my two-month road-trip across the country (Shenandoah, Charleston, Austin, Santa Fe, Sedona, San Diego, Memphis, LA, Morro Bay, San Francisco). Aside from the shell I picked up on my last family trip to the Jersey Shore and the painted rock I have from my best friend’s funeral, I couldn’t tell you which object came from where. The fact of the matter is, I’m in a different place now – geographically and, dare I say, emotionally/spiritually. Symbolism, though poetically interesting, is little more than a knickknack on a shelf if it doesn’t have action or meaning to back it up. While the journey of presence, awareness, and learning to slow down may have started in the months leading up to 1-21-19, the years since have been dedicated to finding within what I had been seeking from others. Over the last six years, I’ve practiced focusing more of my attention on the present moment, more of my attention on living, at least somewhat, deliberately. Over the last six years, I’ve gotten better at appreciating memory and hope not as fixed objects to be clutched, but instead as ephemeral hues that sometimes color the here and now.