When I think back on 2017, I think about thinking back.
Like most people, at the end of the year, I revisit the year. (And like most people, it is the only time I revisit the year.) With the help of my calendar, and Word files (organized by “date modified”), and a ritualistic culling of photos on my phone and accumulated pocket-contents on the dresser top, I look back at what happened. That looking back is always inflected with happiness (no matter how sad the memory), and always with sadness (no matter how happy). The feeling of remembering often overwhelms the feeling of what is being remembered.
This year I looked back on trips to France, Italy and Sweden (and Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Tulsa); a weekend of attending Gettysburg Reenactments; a summer of cobbled-together day camps for my boys; a tree that split in a storm and was this close to crashing into the back of my house, end-of-the-year holidays and nothing weekends; a dozen more unevenly spaced markings on my children’s height chart…
When we were children, my older brother I calculated how old we would be in the year 2000. It required pencil and paper. We then figured out in what years we would turn forty. Those calculations were right at the limit of our math skills, and imagining ourselves as forty year olds was well beyond our conceptual abilities.
I turned forty this year, just as we’d predicted, but imagining myself as a…
