musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Ephemera


Ephemera. I love the word: it evokes the transience of everyday things. It is the plural of ephemeron, from the Greek neuter of ephēmeros, meaning ‘lasting only a day’. It reminds me of the poem ‘Dust of Snow’ by Robert Frost:

The way a crow

Shook down on me

A dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Some images persist longer than the clever way its descriptive words were arranged. So, perhaps it is in the images, rather than the words, that the magic arises. This is not a new idea, however; the 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza felt that when you feel awe or a deep spiritual connection looking at a sunset, even if you do not try to describe it in words, you are observing a part of the divine fabric of reality itself. Ephemera are like that, I think. Words themselves can be evanescent, or merely get in the way; the enchantment resides in the almost forgotten memory they described…

Metaphors can be like that, too: a phrase is applied to a thing as if it were describing something else; within the juxtaposition is the sorcery. They are often the secret of poetry: being led along a path with ever-changing images.

And yet ephemera can contain other fragments of magic: the recruitment of seemingly trivial events; memory cues that remind us of a time we had forgotten. They are the water drawn from a deep and neglected well…

The very nature of ephemera means they often slip by with nary a notice and, so, nary a memory to prove they ever existed… Although I have been interested in writing for most of my life, for some reason I never remembered to keep a regular diary. And even when I thought to write in it, I never attempted to catalogue other than quotidian events: like, ‘today I went to bed late because I had to do my homework’, or ‘today we had meat fritters with the over-cooked beef left from Sunday’s dinner’. In other words the loss of which, had I even dated it, would never have inspired a literary search like for the lost plays of Shakespeare, or any unpublished poems of Robert Frost.

I don’t think I had any appreciation for what might have been lost, or what could have described a different and more interesting childhood. And, with gaping holes in my early recollections of it, I am left with only scattered memories which may or may not have been true.

In fact, though, I have been writing about things that have happened to me over the last 25 years, but not as a chronicle; not as a memoir. And yes, I often prevaricate to make my tales more interesting -so much so that I no longer know what to believe, or at least how much truth I’ve incorporated into them.

Did I really separate and rescue my dog Boots from a vicious Pit Bull on the steps of the Marley Grocery when I was in grade school in 1950ies Winnipeg? Many years later, did I really show up on the porch with flowers on a first date with a girl I hardly knew, only to find out that she’d forgotten all about the date and was about to leave with her boyfriend?

Did I actually get top marks in first year university Botany when, late handing in an essay about photosynthesis, I just made up a  totally unbelievable story about the mechanism? The professor thought it was hilarious and liked my essay so much, she read it to the class. At least (I think) they laughed about it along with her.

Oh yes, and that I used to write the English Lit essays for a girlfriend of mine, making up esoteric, untraceable references to prove my points. Of course, the younger readers nowadays could actually do a much more sensible attempt using ChatGPT or whatever; in my day, though, there weren’t any personal computers, or internet… You could get away with a lot of stuff then. I miss those days.

But what about now, in my golden years? What have I done to chronical ephemera? At first thought, I supposed I was living as an elder in the ‘Dark Ages’: and yet there was no collapse of a Western Roman Empire to blame the dramatic drop in written records; no stagnant, uncultured period of regional warfare and superstition to compare with the bright “enlightenment” of the events around me. I mean I was retired but not dead to novelty. Not blind to ephemera.

And then it occurred to me that most of the essays I have been writing are about events, which, had I not written about them, would have passed unnoticed and unappreciated. Events like the very young girl sitting quietly in the senior’s section near the front of the bus with a bouquet of flowers, who carefully laid them on the seat beside her and, outraged by the angry bus driver who’d just kicked two of her friends off the bus for not paying, confronted him about his temper. She told him he should be ashamed of himself because kids like her who were under 12 years of age do not have to pay. The rest of us, who were also surprised at the temper of the driver, went silent as they saw the little girl doing what each of us had been too embarrassed to do.

The little girl got off a few stops later, and the entire bus applauded and waved to her as she stood, smiling, outside the bus. The driver then got up from his seat and apologized to the rest of the passengers.

Or the woman a few tables away in a busy mall Food Court who kept staring at me across several crowded tables. Although I have always had habit of picking at my ungarnished bagel, I suddenly became embarrassed at being watched. I put down a bagel scrap and concentrated on my coffee to diffuse her stare; when I looked up again, she was walking right beside me to dispose of her paper plate and coffee in the nearby bin. She hesitated by my table and whispered that she now regretted scolding her now-grown children for playing with their food. She smiled at the memory, and thanked me as she moved away.

And then as I was wandering along a forest path, I noticed a lonely burdock still clinging to its burrs in the cold October rains, in hopes, I suppose that I would walk close enough to attach some to me.  Even though I didn’t give it the chance, I still felt sorry that it had not spent its hard-earned wealth when it could; it occurred to me it was Aesop’s ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ fable in reverse…

Are those not ephemera? Are they not worth remembering? I am not dead yet, it seems…

gozzter

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