Forgetfulness, Nostalgia, and The Wretched Ones

"There isn't really anyone left to take pictures with at the end of Les Miserables," said the man who directed and produced the show. Well, that or something to that effect. It was Friday night, at a little dinner theater in Fort Collins. No one told me where my dad was taking me beforehand. I'd had a few guesses, but only in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd be getting to see a live performance of Les Mis for the first time ever. Before Friday, I'd only ever heard soundtrack versions or seen concert performances.

"Dinner and theater are two words that, when put together, mean that neither will be very good," Dad said, quoting some comedian or other modern philosopher whose name he couldn't recall. This night proved him wrong. The food was delicious, and the performance was..... indescribable. I'll venture to say that it had the best Enjolras, the best Eponine, the best Little Fall of Rain, and the best Valjean (except for Colm Wilkinson, but I think it's unfair to compare other Valjeans to him because they would always come up lacking) I've ever seen/heard. And it was wonderful to finally see it staged and acted and everything. I couldn't be happier.

But, at the same time..... it hurts just a little knowing that I'll never see that particular performance again. I can't recreate the way their voices sounded in my head. I don't want to forget the lighting and the echoes and the spotlights and the high notes and harmonies, but I know I will. It is the inescapable and tragic fate of human frailty that, eventually, all things will slip away from our memories and leave us grasping desperately at pockets of mental history that emptied when we were looking the other way. And those things we only witnessed once, with no chance to drill them into our minds and force them to stay with us, will likely be the first to go. That's why I've been dragging myself mentally back to Friday night at every opportunity I get all weekend. I don't want to lose it. Ever.

It makes me think of a quote from a great book I'm reading. In his final moments, a dying man sees something that makes him remember an incident from his long-passed childhood. "I told myself I would remember it forever," he says, "but time goes on and the world fills up with things to remember, things to do, calls on your time, calls on your memory. And you forget the things that were important, the real things."

Today my mom and I went to the library we frequented when I was younger, and through something I said and her energetic disposition we ended up in the children's section looking at movies she used to check out for me. It's such a strange feeling, being in that children's library, remembering how much I loved to paw through the stacks until I found a book or five that looked appealing, remembering watching those videos, but no longer remembering much of any of the stories they told.

I'm probably decades too young to be fretting about losing memories, but I think I've always been that way, loath to give things up. I want to take all the things that are important, the real things, from Peter Rabbit videos to tragic French epics and everywhere in between, and bundle them up and protect them from age and maturity and the passing years. But I know I can't. And so now the fight becomes resigning myself to losses, learning to treasure the real things while they last and learning to relinquish them when their time has passed.

But that's a struggle for a different day.....

~Pearl Clayton