Reminiscing the Past

by Madeleine Kando

Another visit to beautiful Holland, visiting my very very old mother Ata, my past, my buried emotions. It's here that I am able to touch the parts of me that are easily neglected in my daily life.

I look out on fields covered with tulips of every imaginable color as far as the eye can see. Giant windmills with enormous turbines dot the horizon and the smell of grass and cow manure fills the air. The sound of bird song on this fresh early morning and the muffled hum of an airplane flying high in the clear blue sky has ignited the inextricable circuitry of a past life, buried deep inside me, rarely explored but always present.

A past life filled with sensory pleasures, which is the privilege of youth. Have my senses grown dull with age? Or does youth have more time to indulge in the sights and sounds of the world around us? Does the caress of a soft breeze on a young cheek feel different than on mine as I lie here reminiscing on my no longer existing Dutch life?

I look at the shimmer of a spider web caught trembling in this unique Dutch light. Ata's porch has become a refuge from my hectic, cold Boston life. A butterfly is fluttering by in search of his twenty-four hour life and I am in search of my slowly fading past life, like an old black and white photograph, until I cannot see the details any more. Soon only a blank sheet will be left, floating away on the current of the millions of past lives.

Now that I have time to rest, I look back on the road I have traveled and instinctively search for the meaning of my wanderlust, why life has taken me so far from this porch in Bergen.

It helps in a way, to have left. It allows me to distinguish between what happened and what could have been. I could have stayed. I could have never experienced the adventure of living in the New World. Never have been exposed to the cultural confusion that is part of emigrating.

I am glad I nipped my Dutch life in the bud. I know that now. It was the right thing to do. Although a Dutch unwrinkled Madeleine is always standing there, looking over my shoulder as I lead my real American life. I wonder what she would have become had I not pushed her out of the way. Would she have reached a ripe old age, her mind filled with memories of a Dutch past? Would she have been a good wife, a good mother, a good teacher? Would she have wondered, like I do, what the American Madeleine would have been like?

But there would not be an American Madeleine. Not even a potential one. Just like there is no Chinese or Portuguese Madeleine in MY life. So, is it only the people who move away that walk hand in hand with a doppelganger? Or does everyone wonder about the 'what could have beens' when they visit old, familiar places? Does my mother wonder what her non-existent Hungarian self would have been like, had she stayed in Hungary?

She is ready to say good-bye to all the lives she could have had and the one she carved out for herself. She says she does not belong here any more. For her, the die is cast and things have become very simple. That is the advantage of very old age, you can take a step back and know that it is someone else's problem now. She has done her share of wanting. But unlike me, she knows that what you DO have is far more precious than all the wanting in the world. leave comment here