Archive for December 18th, 2008

(turn and face the strain) – David Bowie, “Changes”

Change has occupied my mind much lately. Do people change? Relationships definitely do…places, to a point. Feelings, sometimes…life, constantly. This past summer, I considered how uplifting it was to go back to the family farm in Northern California and find the same trees, the same house, the same heat pressing people into the shade, the same thick juices oozing from plums, fallen in a ring around the tree. I also considered how disconcerting it was to return to my father’s home and find even the front doormat differing from that of my last visit.

I have had much opportunity to look at changes in people this year. Graduating, moving away, then returning, and seeing my old friends from high school again, these things have all presented changes – many which I receive painfully: my best friend’s empty bedroom, where we spent so many giggling nights, my other friend’s music, still playing though our friendship is damaged forever, my old school, still the same, yet unreachable as I have moved on, another friend’s countenance, looking across a table that feels it might as well be an ocean, though we connect, there is a gap that neither of us dares breach.

So, things change – but what is better to be remarked upon is what doesn’t change. One dry humor, the cursing of another as he drives along, the familiarity with which we pile into a car and cruise around. The thought “just like old times” floats in to my mind as we pass a movie theater and deem the current contents unworthy. As I rode around with the two aforementioned male friends, I felt a comradeship. I looked at them, and thought of all my friends.

I find the edges, frayed and worn, which I can still trace my fingers along; the memories, fettered by time, but still there, and in these I find strength – in that car ride, joking about, I found strength.

Stability is something I have grasped for my whole life, and found in the most surprising of places – and mostly in people. In my aunt, living on that farm, still going out to move sprinklers, and laughing with her dancing eyes; in my father, ever working, ever happy to see me, as I run into the same arms I have run into for almost two decades; in my mother, whom I looked up to as so tall and strong years ago, and whom I still look upon, though from a few inches above, as being as strong as ever; in my sister, still gesticulating with her arms over her head, jumping in excitement like a little child.

Do people change? Of course, some parts of them change. However, there is something intangible in each – whether a dancing eye or great mind or a childlike manner – which can be covered, buried, or even forgotten, but which is always there, and can always be found. Like Rusty said in Ocean’s Eleven: “Men like us don’t change, Saul. We stay sharp or get sloppy, but we don’t change.”

And those parts that remain eternally hidden as people move and pass on, remain in memory, or in the voices and faces of those they leave behind. They may be gone, but will never be forgotten, even as the whisps of sand that will dance across empty plains after we are gone will hold the echoes of our laughter and sighs.