Time was
Woman with guitar. c1970.
You know how it is. You come across an old photo. You think… where did I take this? You think… and when? So you stare at it for a while as synapses switch on and dig down into long-term memory. But we know that long-term memory can be faulty, so even when we think we remember an element of doubt remains. What it really there? Was it really then?
Chippendale, wasn’t it, that Sydney inner urban, early Twentieth Century assemblage of terrace houses that were then in need of a good coat of paint and a hammer and nail job but are now the hyper-priced renovated homes of those who can afford them and the fortunate who acquired one before the real estate market went ballistic. Wasn’t it the tiny backyard of one of those old terrace house? A sharehouse? If that is the place, the woman in the photo was not a resident, more a visitor. Am I right in that?
I look at the photo and doubt creeps in. Maybe it wasn’t there. I’m sure this woman’s sister would know where it was were she to somehow stumble across this photograph.
The last time we met? A couple of decades ago, at least. Last time was… where?… Sydney… Annandale… close to where White’s Creek runs through the parkland? Yes. That was it. That was the time she was with her sister and we walked through the park.
I hesitate. No. It wasn’t. Last time was with Rob, his partner and the woman’s sister. We caught a Sydney Harbour ferry to some park on the foreshore and hung out there… walking… sitting by the water… talking… talking… but about what is lost to time. I still see the memory of being there in mind… the people, the place. I hear the voices although not the actual words. Okay. That makes it the early years of this century that we last met, if I am right.
Before that, years and years before that, she… the woman with the guitar… was a resident of a sharehouse where a bunch of us lived in downmarket Wooloomooloo. In our own slum, as her sister put it. Slum? Well, okay. But it was convivial. Years after that sharehouse broke up and its members went out into the world and into the new lives of young adults, I was living in a southern state and she visited me there, just for a few days. Then she was gone again, for years.
The saying that life is a series of comings and goings is right. She came and went in my life for what amounts to a few decades. Then she wasn’t there anymore. Time moves on and so do people. They are still there in memory if not in presence.
Last heard of? That question again, as if last encounters are those that matter most. But, no, it’s not that. It is more like last encounters are points of separation from where people go their own ways into life to maybe, or maybe not, encounter each other again. That is why they are memorable.
Some time ago I asked her sister where she was and learned that she is living in some town in rural Queensland, some out of the way place. That makes sense because she was aways something of an edge dweller. But that was all her sister knew. She has not spoken to her for years.
All of this makes me wonder whether the line from W. B. Yeats poem could also apply to our lives. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. So it is that those who were centre to our lives go out into the world. With their departure, the centre comes apart. What was is no more and we too move on. Then, one day, an old photograph comes to light and we are left wondering… wondering…