Time Paradox

         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.