We must capture those moments as life moves on

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It was one those moments. The kind you want to store under glass, the kind you wish could go on and on.

Such an ordinary moment, just a group of friends sitting around at the end of a day talking. Nothing special, nothing that would make a stranger walking past even pause.

And yet you do. You see it suddenly with new eyes because in a moment of pure understanding you recognize what a gift it all is: laughter, conversation, friendship - common everyday life. You know this deep inside. You've acknowledged it before. But the knowledge is like background music. You don't attend to it. Most time you don't even hear it, because it seems it is always there.

Only "always" is life's great delusion. Nothing is for always. That's why these ordinary moments leap out now and then. That's why they grab you by the heart and scream, "Notice me!" and shine a klieg light on the mundane; so that when time moves on and the moments pass, they will not be lost. They will be captured, somehow, professional photos processed by the mind, bright and shadowless, the images crisp, augmented by sound and scent and feeling.

I remember walking around the schoolyard with my best friend Rosemary. We must have walked around the schoolyard every day for at least three years. But I remember this one day. We were about 8 years old. It was warm. A group of girls was playing rattlesnake against the building. Another group was jumping rope. The boys were over by the rocks. Rose and I were strolling near the edge of the field and singing "Let Me Go Lover."

I had so wanted to be Rosemary's friend, and there I was with her, walking arm-in-arm. I was just a child, but I recognized happiness. I remember wishing the bell would never ring, the day would never end, we would never grow up. And nothing would ever change.

My mind snapped the picture. And in memory, at least, I got what I wished for.

I remember another day, a few years later. Janet Butler and I were riding the swings in a neighbor's backyard and Janet made up words to "Here comes the bride." They were silly, stupid words but they made us laugh so hard we fell off the swings and rolled all over the ground.

I've never forgotten that day, or the silly words, or the sound of Janet's laughter, or the way the earth was still frozen in the shadows and soft in the sun.

My mind recorded this moment, too, as ordinary and insignificant as it was. And it lives within me.

So many ordinary times fill my head. I am in the hall outside my son's room, listening to him sing. "Camptown races sing my song, do-dah, do-dah," the seriousness in his baby voice making me laugh and cry at the same time, wishing he would never stop, wishing I had a tape recorder, wishing these seconds would linger.

And they have - for more than 20 years.

I am brushing my daughter's hair, parting it, tying red ribbons in her pony tails. She is wearing a red and white dress, which I made. She is in second or third grade. It's just another school day, nothing special. But it lingers because I think, how beautiful she is, and the mind records it all.

I am lying in bed with my grandmother, listening to her tell stories. I am lying in bed with my daughter, telling her stories.

I am watching "The Fighting Sullivans" with my mother. I am watching "Mod Squad" with my husband.

I feel the baby kick. I feel my father holding the back of my bike so I won't fall off.

The good times last forever, if we let them. Change is constant but what's past remains the same.

What did I ever do to deserve this, we ask when things are going well, when we sit across a table from someone we love and they love us back, when we walk into a room and are surrounded by friends, when we get more than we think we deserve?

And when things change, when someone we love dies, when friends move, when the world we know turns upside down and lets us down, we ask the same question: What did I ever do to deserve this?

The answer to both is nothing. We don't deserve any of this, good or bad. Life just happens. We smile through some of it, shrug through some more and spend a lot of time shaking our heads.

We weep sometimes, too. But we weep, not for what we want, but for what we've lost. We weep for lost youth, lost opportunities, lost loves and lost friends.

And we weep because at the end of an ordinary day, sitting in a room surrounded by family or friends, we recognize that life requires the impossible: that we know how to hang on to the people we love, and that we know how to let them go.