Louisa, the 84-year old grandmother of the birthday girl, arrived at the party twenty minutes after my children and I did. We greeted her in wavy receiving line, exchanging names and explaining our preschool association with her four-year old granddaughter. Or maybe I have it backwards. Perhaps she was there first to welcome us. All I know is that there was a distinct before and after meeting beautiful Louisa.
Two years ago Louisa moved to Charlottesville to be closer to family. She hails from Richmond. In the few brief exchanges we had between birthday cake and presents, she taught me more about the city than I’ve been able to glean in nearly twenty years of living in its back yard. A thread led our conversation to the doorstep of her childhood summer home, a place on the outskirts of Richmond. Originally a 19th Century resort located on a sulfur spring, the structure was later used as a Confederate hospital. The main building burned before Louisa’s grandfather acquired it, so her family linked together guest cottages built on the hotel’s original foundation. “Magical” was the word she used to describe her summers there. The area was originally settled by French Huguenots. “Our cook’s last name was ‘Bonaparte!'” she exclaimed with a radiant smile.
We sat together outside, watching Louisa’s granddaughter spring back and forth from living room to yard in birthday revelry. I imagined Louisa as a similarly spry young girl, exploring unmarked graves in the Confederate cemetery with her sister. “There was no battle near there,” she explained. “Soldiers were brought from elsewhere and never made it home.”
When I asked Louisa if she still visited the property, her face became drawn. “My mother sold it when I was in school,” she said, clearly still pained by the loss. “The house had the complete works of Mark Twain. Two full shelves of books with orange linen spines. I’d been making my way through them.” Everything in the house conveyed.
Back at home that night, I searched Google Images for Louisa’s summer house. An aerial photo appeared within a few clicks. Not so for her beautifully bound books. I peered through the internet’s satellite lens down onto Louisa’s land and thought of Twain’s writings: “The Mysterious Stranger,” “The Gilded Age,” and “A Helpless Situation.”
Our lives are greatly diminished when we scurry through that narrow track of our lives, never going on that “road less travelled” by taking time with the “Louisa’s” we encounter. It is our loss when, usually quite unintentionally, we marginalize both the younger AND older people who are there right there, just beyond our “narrow track”.
I remember how profoundly I was affected when a young student told me one of the things she missed most in her college experience was the LACK of age diversity. Everyone was within several years of HER age, and she felt the absence of that balance, the “long view”, the psychological “tether” that comes only when we are blessed with those much older and much younger than we. It is the Tooth Fairy stories and the sulfur spring resort stories that give us perspective and so greatly enlarge our experience!
In “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” author Andrew Solomon describes depression as the loss of perspective. During times of great transition, such as new parenthood, separation from community sets the stage for such loss. There are times in life when we desperately need stories for validation and distraction. We need tales that mirror our own experience, and those so different that we can be airlifted temporarily from the pain of our current circumstance.