Years melt away as stranger's face recalls timeless memory

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It happened again a few weeks ago.

I saw him in a crowd, at a graduation, a boy I used to date in high school. I recognized him right away: the dark blond hair, just a little too long to be a crew cut; the thin face; the high cheekbones; the wide-set eyes. Even his clothes looked familiar: blue sportscoat, white shirt, striped tie. I started to wave to him and almost shouted, "Tom? How are you? How've you been?"

But then I realized it couldn't be Tom because Tom would be 49 or maybe even 50 by now and this Tom was just a boy, not even 18.

Time had done something in that moment, crinkled up like cellophane so that it was all bunched together; 1963 was touching today.

I recovered quickly. I pulled my hand to my side and averted my gaze.

The same thing happened once before at a restaurant, four years ago. It took me all night and half the next day to get over it then, to shake the feeling that I had somehow wandered into the Twilight Zone.

I was at a restaurant and a waiter appeared and I looked directly at him and before the cellophane expanded and time was a straight line again, I said, "Timmy?"

The young man standing with his pen poised waiting to take my order could not possibly be Timmy, because Timmy was my age, and the waiter was years younger. But seconds passed before I realized this.

Too much stress in my life, I decided. The thin walls that separate fact from fancy were fraying. I chalked the experience up as a once-in-a-lifetime thing and buried it in my brain.

But now it has happened again.

It's weird. But so is life - how we perceive it and measure it and divide it. My father always says, "How old would you guess you were if no one ever told you your age; if there weren't any mirrors to look into. How old do you feel?"

I feel the way I've always felt, the way I felt yesterday and all my yesterdays. Away from mirrors, away from friends and family, alone on a beach, even alone in my car, I am ageless. As are we all. That's why growing old is so difficult. The soul is eternal; only the body withers and fails.

These moments of false recognition, of seeing in strangers people I once knew, remind me of this. On the inside Tom, however old he is, is still a young man; on the inside, Timmy remains forever a boy.

Maybe that's what we have to remember when dealing with people, especially old people: That they're not just the person they are at the moment. They're a collection of people: somebody's beloved child, someone's sweetheart; someone's best friend, mother, father, grandparent - a general, a nurse, carpenter, singer.

Sometimes when my mother-in-law is telling me a story about her girlhood in Scotland, I think how wonderful it would be if she could just take me there. If she could leave the body that encumbers her today, and become the girl she was and I could become a child again, too, and sit beside her in school and walk with her to church and go home with her for dinner.

Our souls do this; in spirit I am beside her. But our bodies are stuck in the here and now.

These glimpses of people I used to know jolt me into realizing that our bodies deceive people into thinking that this is who we are, that this is ALL we are.

We are so much more. We are like those picture frames popular these days, the kind with pages of photographs hidden behind them. On the cover there is but one shot. And this is what everyone sees.

But if a person takes the time to stop and look behind this single photo, he'll see a lifetime of poses.

But he has to take the time to pause, to look. And see.