Like It or Not, Things Change
/The Boston Herald
It's happened again. I should have learned by now. I know this. Nothing is forever. Things change. People change. Parents age. Children grow. People get sick. Friends move. Colleagues switch jobs. Schools that you went to get boarded up. Hotels where you once stayed get torn down. The world is in constant flux. And yet, when something has been a certain way for a long, long time, when someone lives in the same house for decades, when a person has held the same job for as long as you've known her, when a phone number dialed is the same number you've always dialed to reach someone - it's inconceivable that someday you'll dial that number and reach a stranger.
Most of us don't dwell on these things. We tend to believe in the permanence of routine, and the world seems to abet us in this self-deception, with the sun rising each morning and summer always following spring.
But what we fail to notice, what is hidden in repetition, is that though days may seem the same, they are all different. The seasons may be predictable, but they are never duplicates of seasons gone before.
It takes a jolt, though, to make us acknowledge - not for the first time, but for the umpteenth time - that what has been won't always be. This train ride we call life may indeed go around in circles, but the train makes stops, scheduled and unscheduled. People get off and on at these stops. They change cars. They change direction. They often walk out of your life, sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever.
If you just sit looking out the window, only thinking you should get up and walk into the next car to spend some time with someone you've been meaning to see, but don't because you're tired, because it's been a long day, because the solitude is nice, because 'there's always tomorrow' - this, too, is a ruse. When you least expect it, the person you've been meaning to make time for gets off the train and is suddenly headed somewhere else.
That's what's happened again. Someone I should have made time for is leaving Boston. She has a new job. She's going back home to Nashville where she came from and where I should have realized she'd someday return.
She's not a close friend. But she could have been. That's the saddest part. A little time is all we needed. The chemistry was there. We had dinner once in a while with other people and at functions we'd always talk and laugh together, and once we even had a sleep-over with a half-dozen other women, all of us friends, and it was so much fun we promised we'd do it again soon. Soon. It has been more than a year since that sleepover. Maybe two years, I don't know. Time flies. Life gets in the way, work life, home life, family, friends, obligations, commitments. Even picking up a telephone sometimes seems too much of an effort some days. You look at what you have to do and you know you can't squeeze in another thing, so you don't even bother to call. I always intended to go with her to the church she used to rave about because the choir, she said, was the best she had ever heard.
I'll call you. We'll do it, we both promised how many times? But we didn't. Other things came up. Other things consumed us. They always do.
It's only when you know that someone isn't going to be there any more, that you begin to recognize how much you assumed she always would, how much it pleased you to have her there. It's all so sad - the missed opportunities, the friendships that could have been. Life puts treasures in our way. But so often we don't recognize them as treasures and don't bother to grab them until it's too late.
