Time and Space
Lately, a lot of folks have been saying my mother and I look like sisters, or mistaking my father for my husband. While it’s mainly a compliment—they’re both good looking people, and I’m fortunate to have their genes—of course there’s that trifling part of myself that wonders how much I appear to have aged.
It’s funny, too, because there’s probably nowhere I feel younger than in Key West, where I’ve had some of my happiest flashes of adventure and made some of my most juvenile mistakes. The streets of Key West reflect the strata of different versions of myself: the drunk girl that fell off the back of a boy’s bike that New Year’s, the college student that fled from that hurricane, the young woman that threw her broken heart into the stacks at the public library. I try not to cringe as I look back at these past versions and remind myself that Key West is a place for youthful follies … and follies, period.
I’ve heard Judy Blume, Key West literary grand dame, say “Sure, plenty of writers die in Key West, but we never get old.” Maybe none of us get old here, I thought yesterday, as I watched my 93-year-old grandmother pedal home from El Siboney ahead of me.
“Did you get the to go box?” she hollered back at me, avoiding a chicken.
Though New Year’s marks the passing of a particular block of time, time remains tricky to measure (just recall the difference between ten minutes in bed vs. ten minutes on a treadmill). In Key West, we explain this relativity through adages like “You’re only as old as you feel” and “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.” But we post these bumper stickers on our cars and in our bars to help us feel comfortable with an idea that is actually quite uncomfortable: our desire to slow down or speed up time.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself the uncomfortable questions of time: How much longer will it take me to publish my first book? How much longer will my reproductive system allow me to have children? How much longer will Granny Jane live?
This year, I’m trying to be patient with time, and regard it not as apathetic and stalwart, but much like the island breeze: coming and going at its own pace.
Key West makes me aware of the unflagging passage of time in a way that is familiar and comfortable. We walk by “Off the Hook,” and my grandmother asks me to remind her of what it used to be (P.T.’s Late Night), and she says oh yes, and before that Bobby (the owner) used to shuck oysters at The Raw Bar. But that was before I was born, she reminds me. We drive the convertible that my grandad bought her when she turned 80, which was 13 years ago, and just two years before he died.
Sometimes, with my bare feet, I try to find the rough place in the yard where Hurricane Irma ripped up the frangipani tree, the one that held me, my sister, and all my cousins aloft in a photo from the late 80s. Our shared family memories span back to the ‘60s, when my grandmother and granddad first took their kids to the island, and of course the collective conch memory spans many years beyond that—stories of New Town being built on what used to just be salt ponds, of the cigar factories that helped make the town rich, of the dead girl hidden by the rich doctor, the little boy’s doll that contained a ghost, the gas station that’s now a fish market where Jimmy Buffett once sang for Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.
The hurricane-pocked, humor-inflected history of Key West reminds me that time passes and transforms, but life goes on. When asked about the changes that Key West has undergone in the last 40 years, Jimmy Buffett said “I’ve never been to a place where the people didn’t tell me that I should have been there 20 years ago.” Maybe we could afford ourselves the same nostalgia that we normally reserve for the places we love.
Maybe, in the same way that I smile at the memory of the cat that no longer lives at my grandmother’s, the yellow bike that was stolen years ago, and the favorite watering hole that only lives in stories, I can offer the previous versions of myself some winsome kindness. Maybe, we can look at our broken relationships and awkward phases and growing pains as “the house that used to be here,” with an inward smile.
I won’t go so far as to saying, “You should have known me 20 years go,” but maybe my buddies from high school would.