For those of faith, this is the time to celebrate the Resurrection. But anyone for whom resurrection means a reviving of memory can celebrate. The swelling buds and stirring earth encourage it.
Age bestows wisdom, and a wise man who has felt many springs is thankful to feel another. As times of anticipation, or at least hope, springs tend to revive memories for him that brighten, that recall happy times, the earliest and most lasting being childhood ones.
Curiously, the wise man finds that visual memories may be trusted less than those of other senses, though seeing, at the time of seeing, might have seemed to register most vividly in his mind.
Walking the street that he trod as a child, he can see that earlier street but hazily. Oaks no longer reach overhead to one another, though the street seems narrower than the child’s and distances shorter.
Square houses have shouldered into places that they seem already to have outgrown. Older houses frown beneath gables and sulk with curtains drawn.
Boys and girls run or ride recklessly through his wise mind on tricycles and scooters more distinct than they. Prancing ponytails and skinned knees revive themselves, but faces largely are erased.
What has been received by other senses is more complete as memory. He feels through a child’s bare feet, toughened by dust and stone on a gravel road, the cool sawdust on the plank floor of a country store.
He feels through young legs stung numb in sea foam the tickle of splinters of a riding log. He feels under a child’s rough hands made gentle the feathered flutter of an injured bird.
He recognizes the smells of a child’s past — bread baking, a geranium leaf, leaves burning in fall, hot roofing tar, the salt sea air.
He recognizes the smells surrounding adults: cigar smoke at a parade, whisky, perfume, aftershave lotion, mothballed furs.
He can conjure up the smells of the child himself — gumboots baking, a Cowichan sweater steaming in a suddenly hot spring sun — and of other children like Silvio who liked garlic, or that girl (what was her name?) who thought applications of olive oil were good for her complexion.
Lying in bed at night in the house where the child grew up, the wise man hears again the foghorns that have been silenced, the carols and brass of the Salvation Army borne on a winter wind from distant streets, grinding wheels of a streetcar turning at Windsor Park, the clop of horseshoes announcing the milkman, bagpipes keening in a boy’s head for days after the highland games at Royal Athletic Park.
The house speaks to him through memory. He can hear doors closing and knows which ones they are; he knows which stair is creaking, which dog is barking. The silence, too, is familiar and comforting.
He knows, though, that discomforting memories lurk. He tries not to revive them even in more sombre seasons — memories of striving for what was out of reach, of not striving enough for what was within grasp; memories of what brought embarrassment or shame.
He wonders how many others who have reached his time in life must look back on sorry images of themselves and feel, smell and hear disturbing things because that’s all their memories hold.
He knows that there must be those who have felt a terrible lack in their lives and feel it still, who feel bereaved of success or triumph. Among them are those who blame fate, bear grudges and imagine conspiracies.
In his wisdom, though, he accepts responsibility for all his memories. He knows that they are what link his past to his present and what he will carry to the end or the beginning to come.
A wise man has learned that pain and pleasure go together, hand in hand. He knows that the happiness is greatest when released from the greatest unhappiness which accompanies it. He knows that loss and bereavement are more profound when loved ones go.
He knows his happiest resurrections were mingled with or grew out of adversity, pain and sacrifice — his own or others’.
Like that other Resurrection.
