My 14th birthday was the first birthday I ever spent in my present home, and earlier birthdays in my previous house still seemed so recent that I didn't yet miss the years they represented. It's only when the recent past has 'matured' (like an old wine) and is no longer so close that we begin to pine for it, and such was the case with me. (It's not only absence that makes the heart grow fonder, but distance too.) The last couple of years in my former domicile were not the same as the years that preceded them. I'd already progressed beyond the stage of viewing the surrounding environs of my neighbourhood as my playground, and was venturing further afield in search of adventure. My taste for toys (in the main) was diminishing, and the occasional item aside, comics had become my primary interest instead of being just one of them.
The 'fabric' of my life had changed and was continuing to do so, but it was doing so while escaping my attention, so when my family flitted to my current residence in June 1972, my life continued for the first couple of years or so in much the same way as the last couple of years in my prior abode. And it was this sense of continuity in the pattern of my life over the transitional period between one house and the other that dulled my awareness of an incontrovertible fact - namely, that my childhood had already ended in my former home and I had progressed from one stage of my life to another without being fully aware of the 'metamorphosis'.
It was only with the passage of time and many years after the fact that I realised my actual childhood 'belonged' to a previous house (and other houses before it), and that I'd left that blissful state unawares, as cognizance of the process of one's early life unfolding in stages doesn't consciously register until some way down the track. As I've said before in other posts, life as it happens segues from one 'scene' to another in a subtle cross-fade, but when we look back years later, it seems to jump-cut between them. That's because we recognise, categorise, and compartmentalise retroactively, not during the actual process of everyday life itself.
I think that's why I sometimes make little 'pilgrimages' back to old houses and neighbourhoods, to pay my respects to my demised childhood, even though, as I said, I wasn't aware it had passed away at the time. And hey, perhaps it hadn't, and I'm assigning an arbitrary time of expiry as it subjectively seems to me today, not as it appeared back then. Whatever the case, it makes me wonder how others regard this subject, which in turn leads me to ask the following question to those who feel inclined to answer:
Were you aware of when you ceased to be a child and moved on to the next level of your biological, emotional, and psychological evolution, or - like myself - was it not until many years later while trying to assemble the jigsaw of your life to view the full picture (up 'til now), that you realised you had transformed from a caterpillar to a butterfly without being aware of the fact? Thoughts, theories, and observations will be made very welcome in the comments section.
It's interesting how you mention the way we compartmentalise stages in our life, noticable in retrospect, which I guess is because the distance of time between the separations as you lived the years only become more discernable later. In my case those separations were made easier as many of them coincided with the change from one decade to another, I ended primary school in 1970 and moved to high school, middle of the decade I went to Uni that then wrapped up and shifted to me starting my first job as 1980 rolled along. Then I got married in the middle of that decade and our son and daughter were born towards the end of the 80s but in this case not quite co-inciding with the shift to the 90s. In my case outside of the decade markers I'm not sure I can recall any other pointers to the ending of one stage and the start of another.
ReplyDeleteI started secondary school in 1970, PC, yet I sometimes find myself getting confused in memory as to whether I was still in primary school when certain comics came out. For instance, Thunder, Jet, and Knockout came out when I was at secondary, yet I tend to think of them as comics which came out while I was still at primary - until I remind myself from the dates on the covers that it wasn't so. I've forgotten where I was going with that and just how it relates to your comment, but I assume I was going to say that I obviously wouldn't have had any doubt at the time, but the perspective changes when looking back at things years later. As I've said before, when you're living life without thinking about it, there seems to be just one big now, not past, present or future - these distinctions one tends to make later. Having just re-read all that, it doesn't make much sense, but my mind is in a fog at the moment. You can tell, can't you?
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