The strangest things stick in your mind. Sometimes it feels as if my memories were all thrown up in the air, big and important mixed with random and insignificant. I can’t tell which is which and those that I catch are the ones that will stay with me, the ones that will pop into my mind, unbidden, during the quiet moments in life.
So it was with him. The umpire. I don’t know who he was, beyond his role in the forthcoming game, but his face is as clear as day to me now. Some boisterous fans were catcalling him from the balcony, as you do, but he took it in good stead as he walked past. I can see his face lit up by a smile, open and genuine. He waves a closed fist in acknowledgement of the good-natured ribbing he was receiving. I can’t help but smile at the memory, at the agreeable camaraderie of it all. Yes, it was a football match, your team against mine, but we were all there to have a good time, to have some fun.
Fun. What a strange word to say now. When I was a kid, fun was all that I wanted to have. When you grow up, they persuade you that you can still have fun, but now you need other things to achieve it. Money, a job, expensive stuff, expensive holidays. When I was a kid, I could have fun with just my imagination and anything that was at hand. When I became an adult, fun just seemed to gradually recede from me, getting further and further away with each year. Now I can’t conceive of anything that I could do that could possibly be construed as fun.
They say that in life, there ends up being a before and after, an incident or a life event that is the demarcation of your understanding. Before, you were innocent, living in a state of grace. After, you achieve wisdom, but at the cost of your innocence. Like Adam, you take a bite out of that apple and you attain knowledge, but it’s only a sudden, shattering awareness of your own nakedness, your own inadequacy.
In my mind, the image of that umpire is the boundary, the fault line between my before and my after. My life before that day, with ideas like fun, like family, like friendship, hell, even ideas like humanity, recedes further and further into a past that I can never come near to experiencing again. Now, I have a greater knowledge and understanding of the universe I inhabit, but all it has brought me is fear and dread and pain.
I wonder what happened to that umpire, to those fans, after the sirens sounded that day? Did they survive? Are they, like me, stranded on the wrong side of that fault line, forever looking back over that yawning chasm, to a world that exists now only in the bittersweet shards of memory?
So it was with him. The umpire. I don’t know who he was, beyond his role in the forthcoming game, but his face is as clear as day to me now. Some boisterous fans were catcalling him from the balcony, as you do, but he took it in good stead as he walked past. I can see his face lit up by a smile, open and genuine. He waves a closed fist in acknowledgement of the good-natured ribbing he was receiving. I can’t help but smile at the memory, at the agreeable camaraderie of it all. Yes, it was a football match, your team against mine, but we were all there to have a good time, to have some fun.
Fun. What a strange word to say now. When I was a kid, fun was all that I wanted to have. When you grow up, they persuade you that you can still have fun, but now you need other things to achieve it. Money, a job, expensive stuff, expensive holidays. When I was a kid, I could have fun with just my imagination and anything that was at hand. When I became an adult, fun just seemed to gradually recede from me, getting further and further away with each year. Now I can’t conceive of anything that I could do that could possibly be construed as fun.
They say that in life, there ends up being a before and after, an incident or a life event that is the demarcation of your understanding. Before, you were innocent, living in a state of grace. After, you achieve wisdom, but at the cost of your innocence. Like Adam, you take a bite out of that apple and you attain knowledge, but it’s only a sudden, shattering awareness of your own nakedness, your own inadequacy.
In my mind, the image of that umpire is the boundary, the fault line between my before and my after. My life before that day, with ideas like fun, like family, like friendship, hell, even ideas like humanity, recedes further and further into a past that I can never come near to experiencing again. Now, I have a greater knowledge and understanding of the universe I inhabit, but all it has brought me is fear and dread and pain.
I wonder what happened to that umpire, to those fans, after the sirens sounded that day? Did they survive? Are they, like me, stranded on the wrong side of that fault line, forever looking back over that yawning chasm, to a world that exists now only in the bittersweet shards of memory?
