From the Editor’s Desk: Everything Changes, Nothing Changes (Premium)

I’ve been confronting the past and trying to reconcile it with the present, and all I can say for sure is that while everything changes, nothing really changes. It’s been a regular theme in recent months.

Last month, my wife and I found ourselves bracing in anticipation of a conversation we always when we’re about to drive home after a long weekend in the Boston area. Based on years of experience, it’s always better to leave as early as possible because travel related issues always multiply over the course of a day, whether it’s on the ground and in the air. And with this drive taking a minimum of five hours these days—this is another thing that’s gotten worse over time—leaving early means we can get home in time to actually have a meaningful Sunday, during which we can get work done and relax at home, rather than spend most of the day in the car.

But the friends we often stay with always use this as an opportunity to make us feel guilty, as if every time we leave is an unhappy reminder that we left them behind in a bigger way when we left Boston and moved to Pennsylvania six and a half years ago. It’s a reminder for us, too, that we’ll never really be forgiven for that decision. It’s a cutting mom-level guilt-trip that we dread every time.

Only it didn’t happen this time, for what I believe is the first time ever. And that’s because these friends visited us over the summer for a long weekend, and they opted to leave for home as early as possible on Sunday because of some kids-related commitments later that day. And they, too, enjoyed not losing an entire Sunday to driving. So instead of the well-oiled guilt trip we had become resigned to, we were treated to an exuberant confirmation that our ideas about leaving early were sound. One small step for mankind, I guess, if not for friendship. It certainly made the drive home—which is often monotonous—get off to a good start.

But that trip, like my curiously unsettling November trip to Seattle for Microsoft Ignite, triggered some self-reflection. Part of that is normal, all of my trips have the same effect. But I’ve also been consolidating all of our family photos over what has now been a nearly five-month-long slob, and being confronted by the past so much, having so many “oh, yeah” moments as I see some pictures that may literally be new to me, carries a certain weight, or burden. And like me, my friends have crested their mid-50s and are sliding inexorably into whatever we now call what happens after middle-age. This requires some rationalization.

I try to make light of this by routinely spouting the line, “Getting older is the best!” whenever I can. It’s an updated version of my previous obvious commentary that “Kids are the best!”, a line that stopped making sense when my own kids, who are in fact wonderful and always have been, reached adulthood. But there was that same déjà vu/Groundhog Day feeling all over again, where though everything has changed in so many ways, nothing has changed. This happened a few too many times on that trip.

For example, I sat down with two of my friends at a restaurant/bar that’s been in our hometown for as long as we’ve been alive, a place we’d visited regularly together since we all met in the 7th grade. (In what was called Dedham Junior High School at the time, but is now a modern, energy-efficient masterpiece called Dedham Middle School that we don’t feel a connection with.) And despite the years, and my own physical distance from the place on most days, it was immediately familiar in a way that felt so repetitive that it could have been a dream. As I walked in with the friend I was staying with, the other immediately started berating him about a trip they sometimes take together, and it was so unnervingly the same as this interaction has always been that I think I saw the vague shimmer of The Matrix briefly before the algorithm self-corrected and brought me back to reality. It was bizarre.

But like the folks from Microsoft I’d not seen in person for over four years, the friends from back home, whom I do see several times each year, were also different. Time can improve some things, but time inexorably chips away at you, too, until it wins in the end. And blinking away the miracle of the sameness I had just experienced, I perhaps over-corrected and started obsessing about the changes. The whitening hair and creeping baldness. The weight gain and general unhealthiness. Surgeries, procedures, and medication. And the life changes, big and small. A marriage lost, and a new marriage and family found. Promotions gained, jobs lost, jobs regained, and jobs yet lost again. Success and even recognition, but also more responsibilities, worries, and costs. Who are these people?

Gloriously, the food was as good as it ever was, unlike so many memories from my childhood. But that, too, was alarming in its own way. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. Is this Purgatory?

In going through our photos, I will sometimes come across images from the past that now have new meaning. For example, pictures of the house we moved to in 2017 and then sold a year ago, but taken when my father and Sharon, his second wife, were still together and our kids were very young. I had never had any designs on the place, never expected to move to this area, let alone into that house. And so I didn’t really pay attention to it, never specifically took any pictures of it. But there’s the sun room, in some earlier guise in one picture, or the kitchen that was then over-decorated in a kind of cluttered Cracker Barrel style that my father’s then-wife still prefers to this day.

Or maybe she doesn’t. It’s hard to say because this wonderful human being is finally succumbing to a horrible combination of dementia and Parkinson’s that is now clearly accelerating. And the whole thing is made all the worse because she knows it’s happening. There are many problems with this, but I selfishly worry that my similarity to my father, in appearance, manner, and voice, will scramble something in her brain, and that she will suddenly lash out at me as she has, sadly, with some others in the family. And so I each time I visit her, I wait for it, and I worry about how I will react.

On Christmas Eve, Sharon tripped and broke her ankle, and because of her declining physical condition, it’s likely she’ll never walk again. My extended family here rescheduled our normal holiday get-together so that we could visit with her in the hospital, and we exchanged presents with her there instead of doing so at my sister’s house as planned. And once again, I waited, dreading that moment that is perhaps inevitable. But when it was my turn to hug her, her eyes lit up in another instant reminder of what was, and she held on to me tightly, and she told me loved me. She’s not always there. But she was there then.

And she’s been there for a long time: I was about three years old when I first met Sharon, and among the photos I’m working on are pictures of us together when I was a young child. Opening Christmas presents. Visiting the swan boats in Boston. Skipping stones on a pond. She was as young then as my own daughter is now. Young, full of life, and with a lifetime of promise in front of her. Which is its own kind of terrible heartbreak, in a way, a reminder that everything is changing yet again.