‘Humpty, what is the first thing you can remember?’
He was turning over the pages of an album. He paused. Then he said: ’Riding my trike.’
We could probably equal that. But few of us can remember as far back as our first day out of the womb, complete with lungs, thumbs and fontanelle. It was literally, a breath-taking event. However, we can look back at lesser mile-stones. One such waymark was our first day at school. Suddenly, after years of being somebody special in a cosy family unit, we had to find our place amongst big battalions of 20 or 30. Laurie Lee found huge boys ‘spun me round like a top, screwed my nose and stole my potato.’ The transition from toddler to pupil was disconcerting. Remember?
There was the first time in hospital, the first pay-packet, the first parade as a raw recruit, the driving test, a first visit to foreign soil. There was the gazing up at the stupendous dome of Hagia Sophia and the saunter through the heavily laden solitude of Iona. If we were lucky, we listened to C.S. Lewis’s Broadcast Talks. Maybe we witnessed the immediate aftermath of desperate leaps from East Berlin windows to a West Berlin pavement. We attended the baptism of a son, the funeral of a parent. Remember?
And now we have something new to add to the memory bank. We shall remember the time we went into lockdown. We wore masks. We steered clear of each other. We found ourselves under orders to do this, to do that, to avoid doing most things. Family members were separated, often for long stretches. Those of us who were parents did not know whether we should find schools and shops open or shut. Instead of being creatures of habit, we had to think out every next move. Old tracks were obliterated. Everything was new, untried. No need to remember. These things were thrust upon us daily, willy-nilly.
Yet we survived. We survived because that is the way we are made. That is what we humans do. What at first is daunting, uncomfortable, disorienting becomes a new normal. We learn new habits. We discover, despite our disbelief, that it is perfectly possible, even if inconvenient, to do things differently. We find ourselves living through lockdown and by the grace of God making the best of it. Or perhaps, just perhaps, we belong to those whose thoughts have begun to turn to the possibility that the world we live in has a Maker, that there is a purpose in all the confusion.
Humpty looked up. ‘I’ve found it,’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I had a photo of me on my trike.’ Sure enough, there it was, the little red tricycle in a garden with a blissful young Humpty in the saddle. Memories: we all have them.
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