ARE THE MEMORIES OF YOUR LIFE A BALL OF STRING OR A SEPARATED CHAIN?

When we're growing up, I have the distinct impression that we're not fully aware of the different phases we pass through at the time, and it's only when we look back years later that we can distinguish between them.  Sure, we know when we move from primary school to secondary, when we need larger clothes or shoes, etc., but any differences in our outlook, changes in taste as to what entertains or interests us, how we view our environs and the like, are less obvious to us.  Until, as I said, when we review our lives in retrospect and from a distance.

Perhaps I should clarify.  I was, of course, aware that going from short trousers to long, or moving to secondary school from primary, were significant in some way, but what I mean is that I didn't feel any different as a teenager to how I felt as a child.  Any change in my perceptions as to how I saw the world around me - or myself - (if indeed there was any change - must've been, surely?) were not at the forefront of my conscious mind.  Therefore, it wasn't until many years later that the realisation dawned on me that the period of my childhood transpired in four different domiciles prior to the one in which I now live (and have lived for 46 years out of the last 50).

This, I freely admit, nowadays bothers me somewhat.  Whereas at the time I felt like the same individual on my first day in my new house as I did on the last day of my old, I now seem to regard my time in the two residences (and the ones before that) as being separated by a huge gulf, each period belonging in its own 'compartment' of the mind and feeling like the equivalent of, in movie terms, a jump-cut rather than a fade out or fade in.  I've used the analogy before of life (as we live it) seeming like one long single strand of unravelling string, as opposed to separate links of a chain when we look back on it retrospectively, and I can't think of a better way to indicate how things yet appear to me now.

In memory, time has a way of separating some incidents, items, people, places, into unassembled component pieces, where once they were all part of the one single instrument which defined us as the seemingly unique individuals we are.  Truth be told, I'd already started to leave my childhood behind during the last couple of years in my former residence, but I was unconscious of the fact at the time.  The surrounding environs were no longer my playground; no more 'best man fall', climbing trees, dressing up as Batman, or using a hankie as a makeshift parachute on my Action Man and throwing him up into the air in the adjoining playfield, then watching him descend to the ground.

I had already moved beyond such simple pleasures, but wasn't really aware of how I was 'evolving' in terms of what pastimes I was abandoning and what new ones were calling for my attention.  That precise realisation didn't introduce itself until decades after the fact.  During my early years in our new house, my memories of childhood still felt recent and were readily accessed, but as the decades unfolded, they began to feel like long ago and belonging almost to another dimension, far beyond my reach, except when assisted by old photographs or replacement toys and comics bought as an adult.

So now, today, and for the last few years, the fact that the duration of my childhood doesn't really 'belong' in my present home is something which discomfits me.  My childhood belongs elsewhere, but I could never leave here without feeling I'd abandoned the place of (most of) my teenage and early adult years, and that would likewise fill me with a sense of loss.  Anyone else feel as I do, even remotely and with far less angst, or am I trapped in a world I never made?  (Yeah, that doesn't really make much sense, but I had to get a comics allusion in there somewhere to try and introduce a bit of levity.)

Anyway, if the above abstract nonsense strikes a chord with anyone, feel free to comment in the - ah, what's it called again?  (I couldn't think of a picture with which to illustrate this post - I'll maybe add one later.)              

Posted in: Cartoons