Here we are at the turning to 2014,
and I find myself disconcerted once again by what I have come to call a time
paradox. The phenomenon is a kind of
palimpsest in which the early decades of the old century, years I only know
from tales and images, seep through into the new, preventing the new from
establishing identities of their own. These
fictional years simply refuse to leave the stage. For example, 2014, rather than bringing its
own anticipatory glee, distinctly brings to mind 1914, and I fear the outbreak
of a world war. Yikes! I have experienced this phenomenon every year
since the old century/millennium turned to the new.
The aughts were particularly fraught for
me in this sense since they were the first to do such imaginary battle. (The aughts, I should make clear, are not to
be confused with the “oughts.” The
oughts indicate the relationships between parents and children, church and
acolyte, and ourselves and our consciences. The aughts, on the other hand, designate
the first ten years of the century. I admit that I did not even know what an aught
was until I attended a Harvard University commencement in the seventies, which
is to say my late twenties, when I was employed by Harvard Hillel, the Harvard
Jewish student organization. Let me be
clear. I did not attend or graduate from
Harvard. I was, at that time, the
administrator of Harvard Hillel, the Jewish student organization, so please
attribute no false brilliance, prestige, or elitism to me. Thanks.
At the commencement, the convener began the celebration with a bow and salute
to the men of the aughts, clearly indicating the gray haired and balding shrunken
men seated in the front rows, each row marked with a tasteful cardboard sign
bearing a legend such as ’03, ’04, ’05.
(Similarly gray but not so bald female pates, I have come to learn
recently, are referred to by the young as q-tips. Of course, there were no
q-tips in that crowd.) Ah, I thought, so
that is what the first decade of a century is designated. But even this
knowledge made only a minor splash in my mental puddle. In fact, it was not until I was writing this
piece as we are well into the aughts that I thought I might look up the word. I hesitated, though, as I actually morally
judge folks who stop conversation and flow to look things up on their
electronic devices. But I could not
resist. According to the on-line Merriam-Webster
dictionary (the first notation that emerged in my Google search which did not
require further inquiry, thus not to be taken as a recommendation), aught, to
my delight at something so philologically ironic, means zero, anything, and
everything. Wow is all I can say to
that.) (I might also note that you might
have noted that I have avoided the use of the nomenclatures “twentieth” and “twenty-first”
centuries. This is because, even after
decades of employment of such terms, I still find myself hesitating, momentarily
confused about precisely which century they are designating. (Similarly, I am reluctant to utter the word
“bosom” out loud as I evidently mispronounced it while reading aloud in class
in sixth grade, to the derisive laughter of my classmates who would probably
have at least tittered at the word even if it had come trippingly off my
tongue. I, to this day, avoid the heavily freighted word in speech whenever
possible.) Why, my friends and I always asked, and I, at least, continue to
ask, aren’t the 1800s the eighteenth century, the 1900s the nineteenth and so on? Wouldn’t that make more sense and be easier
to remember and save us all many seconds and second thoughts?)
For me and my peers, the true baby
boomers born in 1947, 48, 49, and 50, as opposed to what I call the baby boomer
adjacents of the fifties and early sixties, the magical millennial year of 2000
had been highly anticipated. My friends,
brothers, cousins, and I spent hours of our youth calculating and recalculating
how old we and everyone we knew would be when the ball dropped to end 1999. (Yes,
the ball was dropping even in my youth.) Our parents, we understood, were probably not
fated to experience that milestone, but we, with just a little luck and
longevity, would most likely live the 50 to 53 years it would take to get us
there. We were destined for the
future. But, from the onset of the aughts, slivers and
glances of olden golden days of small towns, large Victorian houses, bicycles
built for two, straw boaters, barbershop quartets, and calico dresses of the literature,
movie and TV shows I had imbibed in my growing up and adulthood, bled into the everyday
of my new century. So, too, did the
tales and reality of my grandparents.
My maternal grandmother (my
grandfather died when I was very young and I have no memory of him living) seemed
quite early century American to me.
After all, she spoke English with no accent except a New England one and
was born in Nashua in the very Yankee state of New Hampshire, though admittedly
of Polish immigrant parents. (Don’t get
me started on the Yankees, the bane of my youth, always just beating the Red
Sox for the pennant at the end of the season.
Oops—wrong Yankees. Sorry. Automatic reflex for many of us born and
brought up in and around Boston.) This Nashua
evoked images of wooden sidewalks fronting wooden shops and horse drawn
carriages rolling down the main, unpaved street. My grandmother was fifteen years old and
adventurous, or bored and stuck, when the twenty year old itinerant cloth
peddler arrived in Nashua on a Friday to sell to my great grandfather’s
clothing store. As it was the Sabbath, he
was invited to dinner at this one local Jewish household. Evidently, he liked
the young woman he saw, and she was willing to accept his affection. He returned, sex ensued, as then did pregnancy
and marriage.
On the other hand, the often haunting
stories of the early, lonely immigrant life of my paternal grandparents gave a
more melancholy patina to my paradoxical moments. Their apartments always
seemed sad and heavily furnished and pervaded by the smells of gefilte fish,
sweet noodle kugels, and sesame candies.
Their aughts existed in my mind as the era of Jews arriving poor in the
United States fleeing eastern Europe in the face of the destructive pogroms. In fact, though, my grandmother on my father’s
side, while, yes, living a difficult, sometimes desperate life in a Russian
shetl, fled not pograms but custom that designated her the replacement wife for
the unappetizing husband of her recently deceased older sister. My paternal grandfather fled fate, too, but
his impetus was avoidance of being drafted into the Russian army, a future, I
was told, that meant, for Jewish draftees, not just a few years of servitude
but virtually a lifetime of service. These paternal grandparents arrived in Boston
separately, unknown to each other, to live in crowded tenements and electricity
and plumbingless slums to work in the needle trades (grandmother) and as a
carpenter (grandfather). The family story goes, because they were lonely in
this strange land, after a chance meeting on a bus, they married because they came
from proximate villages and spoke the same language. Ironically, the tongue that brought them
together kept them foreign to me as neither ever learned English well, and I
never learned much Yiddish.
All these images continuously leaked
into the days and nights of my new years.
It is as if the old aughts and times were claiming true aughtness and
rightness, as though they are the real 00s and teens, not the aughts and teens of
the twenty-first century. Perhaps the Y2K kerfuffle that signaled the turn of
the millennium was a hint of what was to come for me, a case of the past not
letting go of the present and future. For the millennium, though, it was a
false alarm. Nineteen disappeared and those
new zeroes, the aughts, were added to the twenty without incident. We were not
brought to our knees. The twenty-first century was not to be held hostage to
the twentieth. But, for me, time,
apparently, while it does indeed march on, also circles.
