This rather hackneyed literary phrase has suddenly taken on new meaning for me. I was watching TV the other day when a picture of a walled city in Europe came up on the screen. I found myself, a few moments later, returning to the show I had been watching. But for a few moments I had been lost. I was remembering a visit my mother and I made to an old walled city in Switzerland when I was ten. I saw my ten-year-old self sitting on the side of the bathtub waiting with no luck for hot water to come out of the tap marked F, as I had decided that the C tap stood for cold, not knowing that it stood for the French word chaud for hot. I can see us cuddling up together in a large bed snuggling under a white fluffy duvet, warm against the fall night outside, and then waking up to hot chocolate with a crest of whipped cream and a flakey croissant.
I see a little girl in a swimming suit and for a moment I am back beside a pool watching three small girls in brightly colored suits racing for the sparkling water of a pool somewhere in the past. I pass a school bus stop with children waiting for the bus and for a brief moment I am looking down the street at the trolley that will pick me up and take me to third grade.
These flashes do not mean that I am quietly losing my mind. It just means that I have a rich treasure of memories and enjoy, for a few moments, when they surface unbidden. There is nothing wrong with an older person, who for a moment recedes into an interesting past, only to return to today with an other-worldly look on their face.
I remember my grandmother at the end of her life, sitting in a wheelchair looking out her window as the trees outside changed from summer green, to fall color, to winter black and white. She commented to me one day, when I was too young to understand, that she did not mind being alone as she was not lonely. Only now do I understand that she had, underlying her quiet present, a rich past to remember and enjoy. I hope for that too.