BY ALEX STORY
The children looked so young. The pictures were only taken a few years ago. They lived with us then. Chaos and life danced together, naturally, in harmony. They are gone now. Silence rules. When we speak, mostly over devices, and if time allows, their voices are deeper, intimating a gradual discovery of the world as it is. When we see them, time passing is visible. Maturity ruthlessly conquers their childish hearts and stamps its unrivalled authority on their bodies, as they morph into us at the speed of a relentlessly ticking clock. When we ask them, their lives become increasingly mysterious. The horizons of the universe they inhabit expand way beyond the magnifying power of our parental telescope.
My parents, for their part, can barely walk now, though they remain active. He sings and she paints. He writes and she tends. He tells me of the fast bowlers of his time, the children of the dog fights and doodlebugs he witnessed, and the nearby craters in which he played. She remembers her first chocolate cake, tells the children about when she first met him and how he asked her to marry him three days after they met. They have been married over 60 years. A miracle, she says. A tear of joy and defiance forms by the side of her eye, when she has the energy to reminisce. We, their union’s unwitting product, nod. Truly, chance was our only friend. On occasions, rarely though, they talk of their grandparents, shining a faint glimmer of light on Europe’s fallen empires. Paris, Vienna, and Bombay among others. Friendships, music and hardships across time come to life. They were like us. The mind wonders.
Sometimes, ancestors make a cameo. The Blessed Jonathan Story, Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University, and Member of Parliament in and around Somerset, enters the stage. He was hung, drawn and quartered in 1571 by Elizabeth for being loyal to Mary, anchoring the family in the fertile soil of the past. We belong here.
Further back, the Stories, the name meaning “Big” in Scandinavian, so the story goes, came with the Norse hordes to conquer the land of Northern England. They were, as they say, the doctors and engineers of today, daily landing on our shores. Family histories remind us, indirectly perhaps, that while technology shifts, overwhelming the present, the foundations of human life stay much the same, handing permanence its inevitable victory. There is noise, of course, and sometimes extraordinary, such as a Tesla Roadster or Artificial Intelligence, it would seem, but no discernible change. We are what we were and will be what we are.
As Canadian comedian Norman MacDonald wrote in Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, written in 2016: “The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.”
So, I stand there, no longer young, my arms dropped by my side, looking up, in sadness and hope, resigned and delighted, no longer trying to grab time to keep it close, loving the life I was given, the family that chose me, the children I had, the woman who accepted me as her husband, and the friends I made. Beyond that, I am grateful for the constraints with which I was born and without which I would never have failed and, in the crucible of an ephemeral life, find out the things and those I truly loved.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.