Fleeting Images

I saw someone yesterday I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was me. A few fleeting images from an old video confirming that it’s true I was once a teenager. I was at a wedding reception for my cousin, Bob, and, while I can’t be certain of the date, I surmised I was about 15 or 16. My hair was dark; I was clean shaven; and I was wearing what was for that time in my life my trademark goofy black eyeglasses that looked more suited to Mr. Magoo than a wannabe man about town. I was not alone there. My sister, Susan, was seated at the other side of the large round table looking suave and sophisticated for someone about to leave her teen years behind. And, my parents were there. They weren’t on screen for more than a minute, but even in just that short span it was electric to me. It sounds so silly and old school, but seeing them “live” and not just as a still image staring back at me from within a picture frame was transfixing. My folks have been gone for decades and so seeing their moving images, even the slightest of quirks or facial expressions or arm movements took on for me a far greater significance than they were owed. My father was the debonair guy I remembered, looking dapper in his dark suit, leaning over and sharing some secret with my mom. She played to the camera with a smile worthy of an old-time movie queen. They would not have been out of place in Monte Carlo.

To a lesser degree, I reacted the same way to seeing myself, simultaneously a total stranger and yet one and the same as the older and grayer guy glued to the TV screen taking it all in more than a generation later. Who was this guy? Could I have really been that shamelessly goofy? Was I really so awkward, so gawky? When I was 15 could I possibly have projected ahead and seen what I might be like some day? Could I do the reverse, and close my eyes in an effort to put myself back into the psyche of that strange looking teenager? I know that the young Jeff was incapable of such forward leaning thought, and I know as well that the far older Jeff has left his predecessor too far behind in too many ways to attempt a similar time-tilting somersault.

Those images, as fleeting as they were, stayed with me when I went to sleep last night. They played over and over in my head. I realized that my reaction is a reflection of the time I have been here on planet earth. In today’s world, video is so ubiquitous, so accessible, so taken for granted, that young kids will always have their younger selves as company as they grow old. That mystery and excitement I felt in those all too fleeting moments will be lost to them. I don’t know that I am jealous of them or that I feel some pity for their loss of amazement and joy that surely accompanies the finding of something lost and then found.