Return to Long Ago

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I hurry, worried now that I won't have time to find my mother's grave. Hastily, dourly, I search the monuments. And there she is, fifth from the gate along the wall. The stone is quite small, no larger than a pillow, with Eva's name and my father's and my own: "Beloved wife of Kenneth Livesey, mother of Margot." I stare at it, consumed. Then I lie down on the grass, pressing myself close, closer, trying to still my beating heart.

This sounds embarrassingly morbid, but in fact it was the reverse: not morbid but vivid -- full of life. After my decades of neglect, there she was, Eva, my mother, unscathed. As a writer I've spent years wallowing in the past, subscribing to various theories: It's writ in stone, writ in water, can never be known, can never be escaped, must be remembered, and so on. My answer to Kirsty was a desperate lie. My problem is not forgetting but the reverse: a surfeit of memory.

This evening, however, as I drive back to Edinburgh beneath a full moon, the past sits beside me, easy as an old friend. Forget the Heisenberg principle, which claims that the observer always alters the thing observed. What I learned today was my own irrelevance. The past exists irrespective of my observation -- I can pay attention, or not: who gives a toss? -- but the present, the difficult, intractable present, lies all around me, and it's time now to reach towards it, greedily, with both hands.

From Five Points (Winter, 1997). Subscriptions: $15/yr. (3 issues) from Georgia State University, University Plaza, Dept. of English, Atlanta, GA 30303-3083.

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