sonora2sonoma

Originally written 22 November 2015

The house I grew up in had a large yard, the street behind it being the outermost of four streets that ran parallel to each other across the breadth of the gently sloping little valley that defined the environs of my neighborhood.

Beyond the street behind my house lay an open stretch of hills, meadows and oak forest that extended for miles, relatively unobstructed by fences or buildings, toward the Sierras to our east. A rock wall, erected in the 1930s by the Works Project Administration, marked the boundary between my backyard and the world beyond. As the back street was above the level of our yard, access to it required scrambling up the wall the five or six feet to street level. Spaces between the rocks provided footholds making this climb easy for someone young and nimble to accomplish.

The woods behind my house not only captured my imagination as a young boy but also featured largely in my dreams; those woods ultimately came to symbolize, as I now sit back and reflect, the vast, unknown, open page, or tabula rasa, of my life as it lay before me, yet unexplored and awaiting time and caprice for its unfoldment.

I often and distinctly recall a moment sixty-plus years ago, when I sat perched atop that wall in reflection–if reflection is not an appropriate term to describe the musings of a boy of eleven, then musing most certainly is. It was the first day of summer vacation and the whole of my favorite season lay before me like an exciting and mysterious present yet unopened. Not only did I have a summer free of the duties, responsibilities and requirements of school to look forward to, I mused, but I also had my whole life ahead of me, with the reasonable and hopeful expectation that it might be blessed with longevity.

I still remember how it felt to think these thoughts back then, similar to how I felt as a boy at Christmas-time when first seeing the tree ringed with presents, or the way it felt before taking that first bite of chocolate sundae at the ice cream shop. I’ve always savored the expectation preceding the experience, whatever the event itself might be. I still do so today; the promise, the mystery and excitement never cease to hold me in thrall.

Now, as my number of days past exceeds those that lie before me, that moment on the wall seems more poignant than ever.

As day turns into night, the dance of life and death, as with all the other dualities in life, denotes the beautiful yet frightening symmetry of all things. The poet and visionary William Blake perhaps said it best when he wrote, in his poem Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

But what once was hope need not become despair. It’s all a matter of perspective, really. Life truly is what one makes of it and tomorrow, if one chooses to see it as such, is another tabula rasa just as surely as it was to that eleven-year-old boy perched on that wall so long ago. Only now I have much more to reflect upon.

Tim Konrad