Wistful. I have given thought to that word more often than not these days, as I am, for most of my days, wistful. Perhaps Dad's passing has to do with that, or perhaps it's because I'm a photographer, a storyteller, someone who watches from the outside and attempts to understand and to ascertain what one is in the middle of at that particular moment in time.
When I was in high school, we never bought or paid for a bottle of water. We drank straight from the tap or, as you see in all the GenX vids on socials, from garden hoses, and it was fine. These days water is bottled and sold. It's mostly wasteful and costly, so we have a water purifier in the house.
In the middle of the day, I stand at the kitchen sink. The smaller, taller tap is the purified water. It's a pleasant day, not too hot and not too cold, and the sun is out. I hear the birds chirping and the seagulls passing above.
No one is home. There's the quiet, and I'm transported, as I often am when quiet surrounds me. I don't reach for my phone. There's a lemon tree outside the window, and I just zone out, staring at the lemons on the tree. Even whilst I stand there, mind blank, another part of my mind goes back to thoughts of planting fruit trees with my dad in a brand new house in South Natomas. I was 15 years old.
I am at peace, and then the breeze, slight and fresh, and suddenly I have a feeling, a sensation, that one day, in the near or far future, I will miss this place, this moment in time. I've seen a video making its rounds on socials.
The video is sometimes AI. It's of the 70s or the 80s, and the voiceover says something like, "I wish someone had told me that I was already living in the best times of my life."
I think of those who were older than me when I was in my 20s. They used to say, "Oh, you kids have it good these days," and we never paid any attention to that. I don't think we were ever supposed to. We were just supposed to push it off, because the realization that life was good then isn't something we were supposed to be aware of as youngsters. We needed to figure it out for ourselves as we got older.
I'm not sure if I have actually figured it out. I do know that these days, I'm more aware of time passing.
Dad had this thing he used to tell us, tell me mainly. Don't put it off for tomorrow. You may have more to do tomorrow, and you'll never get things done. Once, I had to file some paperwork and told Dad I would do it tomorrow because I had lots of other things to do. He said, "If you can make time for it, do it, because..." and so on. For all that he tried, and all that he tried teaching, sadly he was unable to finish his own, and now we're sorting out what he left behind. And me, at 59, maybe I'm feeling like I'm rushing to get done whatever we were given to do.
The pitcher is full. I shut off the water, and now it's a bit colder and the fog has come in, a stark reminder of how quickly things change, not just the weather, but life.
