Getting Smaller

Getting Smaller

I was watching an obscure little film from 1993 called Indian Summer. It had a great cast with Alan Arkin, Diane Lane, Matt Craven, Bill Paxton (RIP) and Kevin Pollak. It is another Big Chill movie with a summer camp twist. I am sure many can relate to the ensemble of characters and roles, not to mention the reminiscences of summer camp summers past. At one point in the story, there is a conversation among the campers that everything about the camp has changed in the intervening twenty years since they were campers. Kevin Pollak cannot stop from saying that he is amazed at how much smaller everything has gotten. There continues a discussion on the relativity of perceptions and we are all reminded that memories shrink and fade to some and grow and gain importance to others. What causes this distinction?

Perceptions are interesting. I have a dear friend, Arthur, who has been a motorcycle buddy for twenty-five years. He goes by the handle Living Legend, which is a nod to his 87 years young. When we first traversed the canyonlands of the Southern Utah he could not get past the perception that all that he could see was once underwater in millennia gone by. Every viewpoint that we stopped at was met with some version of the comment, “It’s hard to imagine that this all used to be under water.” It got to the point where I had to title my trip story Arthur Goes to the Seashore.

Memories are also wonderful things, but they have a life of their own. Sometimes they are manipulated consciously to create a fabricated reality that appeals to us more than the actual events. Sometimes they are altered subconsciously or drift to form a more logical or more compelling story we wish we had to tell. Inevitably the unfavorable tends to fade while the aggrandizing gets puffed up. They say that time gets away from us, but memories actually get the better of us. Eventually they overcome the reality of the past and creep up to consume our present.

When I returned in middle age to visit the little tropical valley in Costa Rica, where we had lived the original “Pura vida” for two years while my mother, regrouping after a divorce, was sorting out her career goals, I made a discovery. She worked for a tropical agriculture institute there, doing extension work with the local indigenous people. The Institute grounds were a small haven from the encroaching jungle and the gritty lifestyle of the local population, who had no electricity or plumbing at that early stage of their development. They built cinder-block homes with tile roofs that were pretty basic by U.S. standards, but wildly better than the tin-roof wooden shacks with dirt floors that otherwise served people as shelter. We had to wait our turn for such a castle, since we had just arrived and they were still building their array of bungalows. When we moved in, it was hard not to notice that they had excavated a large boulder when laying the foundation. It sat squarely in our front yard and as the construction team moved on to do seasonal work elsewhere, it became clear that the boulder was not going to be moved. It was huge, and it became a fixture in our yard. It loomed over our heads and we finally found a way to integrate it into our landscaping plan by planting flowers around it. I was sure all this would help me find our house when I drove around the Institute grounds after a thirty year absence.

I drove up and down the few streets there were (the Institute had not changed too much other than vegetation maturing), but I couldn’t spot the boulder. Finally, when I was fairly certain I was in the right spot, I walked up closer to a mature house and grounds. As I walked past a low hedge, I glanced to the left and saw a rock hiding behind the hedge. This was a rock, not a boulder. But it had flowers planted around it as we had planted around our boulder those thirty years before. I examined the rock and it’s shape came back into my mind very clearly. This was my old house and this was my old boulder. At first I wondered if it had worn down from the elements, but this was not soft limestone. It was an igneous, volcanic rock that was hard as…a rock. I had no choice but to accept that my memory was flawed and that the boulder hadn’t changed but I had. When I was six-years-old I was under four feet tall. As an adult I was 6’5”. The world around me at six was a small world, but a gigantic world at the same time. As a well-travelled adult, my world was wide and large, but the specific landmarks of my memories were very small. My boulder was really a pebble.

My reaction was disappointment. That seems objectively silly. Why should I care how big a rock in a yard in a tropical valley in Costa Rica was? I think it’s because we value and defend our memories. My memory of those six-year-old days was a set of grand memories with many adventures. There were green banana stories, monkeys that ate my scrambled eggs and big snakes I killed and dragged behind my bike. I can’t be sure of any of it now. Maybe it was one green banana I ate not a dozen. Maybe I only saw a monkey at a distance and my eggs weren’t involved. Maybe I only once saw another kid with a snake. What I know is that I had an adventurous and romantic two years living in that tropical valley. Well, what I know is that my memory of those two years was grand and adventurous.

As I contemplate that disruption to my sense of self, I’ve decided that the damn rock shrank. My time in Costa Rica was wild and harrowing. Those days made Raiders of the Lost Arc look tame by comparison. I was a young Harrison Ford. I chose not to take a picture of my boulder. What’s it say on the side view mirror? Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they really are. Well, they may appear smaller than they really are too. Nothing in our lives and memories deserve to shrink with time and distance. Nothing needs to remind us that we are all getting smaller.