I was thinking this morning how it would be very cool and very useful to know how we are remembered once we are no longer around. I suppose it's a little like the script of Carousel, where Billy can look down at the world he left behind, except for him, poor schmuck, it's too late. It's not as if he can make corrections to his life's script (his one effort to do good seems so ridiculously paltry that I hardly think it counts, even though in the movie, it buys him a spot in heaven). I have a chunk of luck in this regard: I left my UW teaching job just as my daughter was launching her career there. In the ten years I've been away, new people have joined the faculty, but many of my former colleagues are still there. Occasionally some of them will tell her something about my years there and good soul that she is, she'll pass their words on to me. Sure, if someone felt aggrieved by something I did, she wont hear it. People aren't stupid -- they're not going to tell my daughter where they think I may have erred. But I do believe these spontaneous comments of an appreciative nature have been genuine and they allow me to see where I did okay, where I left a good mark. And since I'm not dead yet, they're not like a eulogy. I can take these encouraging statements to heart and use them to imagine an even better path forward in my encounters with friends and even with strangers. Billy never has a chance to build on the good. But most of us still have a few good years for an all-out effort! [Of course, in his case, post mortem regrets about beating up his girlfriend and pulling a knife on someone in an attempted robbery makes me think that his good deeds were well hidden. I would guess that most of us are not out to rob, steal or beat up anyone. Our very correctable misdeeds are so often simple omissions: the kind words and inquiries into the needs of others, time given to someone who needs a sympathetic ear, a ready smile to a stranger -- that kind of thing.]
Lily snipping makes you thoughts run in interesting directions.
Breakfast. We haven't done a selfie in a while!
And then I watched a Lincoln Center production of Carousel. Just because I could.
Carousel the movie came out just a few years before I moved to the U.S. (temporarily, as a diplomat's daughter), but it was one of the first films I saw in this country. I loved the music and later, in my years of teenage angst, I'd play "When you walk through a storm" and weep as only a sixteen year old can weep. The subtleties of the story (which is actually not American at all, but Hungarian!) were far less relevant to me then, though I appreciated the fact that you could be in love with someone whom you knew was not good for you and who would ultimately make you unhappy. Julie (in the story) and I shared that!
So this was my afternoon. In the meantime, the young family went to our Dane County Fair. They sent me this photo (with Snowdrop, I'm told, being one of the passengers):
"Yes, but did she like it?" -- I texted.
"Amazing! Loved it!" -- was the response, proving that our children and grandchildren are not exactly spitting' images of ourselves. (Thank goodness!) Me, I was happy spinning around on the rural roads and bike paths with Ed, on my e-bike of course.
In the evening, the young family comes here for dinner.
(I have a rotation going: today its time for pasta with shrimp and scallops.)
The day's not too hot, not too cool. Perfect porch weather.
A summer evening like so many others here, at the farmette. Fireflies too numerous to count. Chickens getting sleepy up on the beams of the barn wall. One lily fading, the next one getting ready to open up. Ed and I, on the couch, with a happy exhale.
