`I Was No Longer Young'

Samuel Johnson was not among the great letter writers in the language. He was not, in other words, John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson or Flannery O’Connor. We read his letters because they detail the mundanities of Johnson’s life, especially finances and literary politics, and not in expectation of wit or memorable turns of phrase. For Johnson, letters were an expedient means of communication, not a rehearsal for literature. But close reading turns up gems of observation, those casual insights into human nature that were Johnson’s gift to us. On July 20, 1762, Johnson wrote his friend Giuseppe Baretti:

“Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My playfellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.”

Johnson was 52 when he wrote this of Lichfield, as I was when I visited my hometown last October for the first time in many years. My brother and his family live in the house we grew up in, but only three neighbors remain from our childhood. One who moved away long ago was acquitted last year of murdering his wife. Many are dead, though I effortlessly remember faces, clothes, gestures, even scraps of conversation from almost 50 years ago. One theory of memory posits that it is aided, made adhesive, when associated with strong emotion. If this is so, why are so many early memories so mundane, so memorable for being so unmemorable, though no less precious to me?

I visited Pearl Road Elementary School, in Parma Heights, Ohio, where I started kindergarten in 1957 and left the sixth grade in 1964. It was a Saturday, so I could not go inside, and the October sun was brilliant and blinded the windows with glare, but I peered into my third-grade classroom, where I spent a year with Miss Shaker. This was the room in which we watched President Kennedy’s inauguration on televison – the fire in the dais, Robert Frost reading “The Gift Outright” from memory. Here, Lynn Kilbane leaned over kissed me on my left shoulder. And on the roof above the room was the civil defense siren that screamed during “duck-and-cover” drills. All of these memories seem as vivid as my sons’ faces.

I apologize for my middle-aged self-indulgence. Perhaps such memories are made to remain private, to be replayed on the exclusive screen in our heads. Johnson, I think, would have been forgiving. In The Rambler, on Aug. 7, 1750, he wrote:

"So few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man, and so frequently are we in want of present pleasure or employment, that we are forced to have recourse every moment to the past and future for supplemental satisfactions, and relieve the vacuities of our being by recollections of former passages, or anticipation of events to come."