February 16, 2025 by Amy
Time Travel
My local library system recently opened a new flagship location, which is wonderful since it’s five minutes from my house. The first time I visited, I walked around to get a feel for the place. It’s pretty snazzy, but I was super jazzed to find an entire set of shelves that holds yearbooks, both high school and college, from around the region. I thought I remembered where my gran went to high school but when I looked, I instead found M’s grandmother. (What are the odds?!)
I discovered that this woman I had known for over thirty years had been active in student council, the Scholarship R’s (whatever that is), the Carol Club (not surprised…she was a great musician), the Photoplay Appreciation Club (again, no clue) and the International Correspondence Club (?). She looked exactly the same, only her hair was brown instead of white. From what I can tell thanks to the internets, the Photoplay Appreciation Club discussed the burgeoning film and movie industry. Another search leads me to suspect that the International Correspondence Club was a really fancy way of saying “pen pals.” I now have a million questions for Grandma—such as with whom did she correspond?—but since I discovered her yearbook after she passed, I can’t ask them.
As for my own grandmother, whose yearbook I found on today’s trip to the library after my cousin corrected my information about where she went to high school, I learned that in her sophomore year, she played both volleyball and softball. I faintly remember someone telling me about the softball, but I had no clue about volleyball, a sport beloved by both my husband and my child. How on earth did my tiny, five-foot-nothing grandmother play volleyball? “It was a different sport back then,” M said. Of course.
It’s such a foreign concept to think about the people in our lives having full-blown, fleshed-out interests and activities way before we came on the scene. My perception of both of these women are of sweet older ladies who were focused on their families. They revolved around the suns of children and grandchildren and, eventually, great grandchildren. How strange to realize that they were, of course, their own suns, bright and shining and separate and apart from all of us.
If these people I adored can be such strangers to me, how can I trust that I really know anyone at all very well? I live with M, of course, so I probably know him best of all. There are still compartments of his interior life, though, into which I haven’t been invited, nor will I ever be. Zoe has been away at college for six months and is busy building a life quite separate and distinct from her parents (as she should). Our orbits will only continue to grow apart. Yes, we talk daily and we are plugged into her comings and goings more than the average parents and I consider us very lucky to have this sort of open relationship. But she cannot share every single thing that happens, every thought she has, every experience and every discovery and every tiny little occurrence that makes up her daily life now. Nor do I expect her to.
So I suppose the only person we can ever really know truly and deeply and as close to one hundred percent as possible is ourselves. And yet, we’re awfully good at hiding parts of ourselves from ourselves, those deep down parts about which we are embarrassed or ashamed. It’s hard to admit that we’re not perfect, right? It’s hard to admit that there are unchangeable parts of us, unchangeable parts of our pasts, feelings and suspicions and beliefs etched in stone because of the experiences we’ve had, and that there is no one in the whole world who has shared all those experiences with us. There’s just each of us individually, which feels rather lonely.
Will it ever matter to anyone that I was a Pantherette for four years, a member of Students Against Drunk Driving, and inducted into the National Honor Society? That I tried running cross country one season and absolutely hated it? Does anyone care that I put together, almost single-handedly, a four-carousel slide presentation of photographs for my senior class? (Hell, I don’t think even my classmates realized I did that at the time!) No, none of this does matter or will matter. It all adds up to create the me I am today, though. The person known—and loved—by my husband, my child, my father, my friends. Perhaps the details aren’t really important after all…it’s the composite of all these experiences that make us who we are, and for which we are known and loved.
Maybe I don’t need to know the specifics of Grandma Zlatic exchanging letters with someone overseas…I do know that she was full of love and compassion for others, even those not like her, and perhaps that International Correspondence Club experience colored and shaped her world view for all the decades to come after high school. I don’t need to know whether Granny had a wicked serve or played back row or left field. I know that she remained incredibly active throughout her life and that physical health was important to her (and to those she loved: she learned an entirely new way to cook and assess food when my grandpa developed diabetes and needed a special diet).
I have decided not to mourn what I did not know about those I loved, and do not know about those I love, but instead to celebrate the people they were, the people they are, knowing that the specifics aren’t important, but the totality of their being is what counts. We are all the sum of our parts, and I choose to cherish the parts of you I see and the parts of you I cannot. I celebrate all of you, in your imperfect perfectness, your mysteriousness and your sacredness and your profanity.
And suddenly, just like that, I realize we’re all not quite so alone after all.
Note: the header photo is of Southwest High School in 1942, the year my grandmother graduated. The building now houses the Central Visual and Performing Arts School and Cleveland NJROTC High School.
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