Last year I was on a date, and, being somewhat new to San Francisco, proposed a walk directly through the Tenderloin. After we arrived, my date was somewhat disturbed: “What happened?” I said. “Didn’t you see the naked man pooping in front of you?” She said. I had not seen this. (For the better, perhaps, in this case).
The list of things that I don’t notice goes on much longer, though of course I only find out if someone else was there, and asks me about it. It seems that I miss a lot of traffic accidents, criminal activity, animals, bright and colorful objects, signs, and so on. Once, still living with my family, I remarked on a tall, decorative plant — practically a small tree, I thought — in the living room. “When did we get this?” I asked. My family looked at me quizzically: “Jacob, it’s been there for two years.”
I have the continual experience of discovering things that seem to me new and interesting that have, I generally find, been there all along, quite noticeably. In my defense, I have very poor vision, but also have corrective lenses, so it’s not a particularly good explanation. A better explanation might be that I have a one-track mind, and it’s very hard for me to multitask, so I’m usually engaged in something that I was already intending to do, or to think about, leaving little room for real-time observation of the world.
One downside of all this is that my childhood and adolescent memories are sparse, and largely abstract. I can remember fairly well what I was thinking about at various stages of my life (for example, at nine, I was very interested in the numbers in the church hymnal, as displayed on the rack above the pulpit, and in drawing diagrams of roads, and so forth), but it’s very hard to recall specific events or happenings. I remember thinking that time blurred together, so that I only really noticed my birthday and Christmas for a few years: the rest of the time vanished like mist. (I think that I was reading books for most of that time — perhaps a few thousand of them.)
More broadly, I worry that I was missing the *point* of whatever it was that was going on around me: Family secrets and true identities, the history and purpose of the institutions around me, the social activities and cliques of my peers; whatever was not explicitly pointed out to me (and probably many things, even, that were). Here and there others will tell me more of what went on, and each time it’s like the blinders are pulled off and I understand a new layer of my own history.
I felt this regret most acutely at my grandfather’s funeral, earlier this year. I felt sad that, though I ‘knew’ him the best of any of my grandparents, that time passed without really getting to know or understand him. I felt strangely distant and disconnected from someone whom I should have been so close to. The funeral itself was oddly impersonal, despite the many connections and friends he had in life, and mirrored to me how little I really knew or understood or noticed him. And I wonder how many things he did or said that I should have treasured up, that instead flew right by me, like so many other things seem to.
