A similar experience occurred a week or two ago. A colleague of mine, a history instructor on our campus, was browsing through this blog. She saw the photos of Elizabeth and me when we were working at Anasazi. She did a double-take and said "Is that you? That doesn't look like you." When I burst out laughing, she did some backpedaling and said, "It's just that you look more mature, wiser, now."
I know I've aged noticeably in the last 8 - 10 years. I've also gained some weight; I could stand to lose about 20 pounds. This extra weight shows itself off well in my rounder, jollier face. But I think the most striking differences between then and now are those that outwardly demonstrate my place in society. Back when Elizabeth and I were working at Anasazi, and then for the first year or so after we were married, we were blissfully outside the mainstream. We traveled and lived on a shoestring. We bucked against convention (as faithful Mormons, our "bucking" would seem fairly mild to some). We analyzed everything. We wore home-made moccasins and necklaces whose cords were darkened and made shiny with neck grease. We considered the joys of nudism. We didn't always shower; we didn't always shave; we didn't always cut our hair. Sometimes we wore the wrong genre of clothing to social gatherings just because we didn't want to conform.
A few years ago, when the seep willow necklace broke that Elizabeth had made for me at Anasazi, I felt a sadness I couldn't then understand. I wore that tan necklace for several years after we were married. I never took it off. In the shower, I would slide the necklace up my neck and soap myself, then let the necklace roll back into its familiar resting place just above my collarbones. When I wore T-shirts, the wooden necklace would display itself by hanging just over the neckline of the shirt. Button-up shirts, however, would completely obscure the necklace. Sometimes, when I wore a semi-formal shirt, I would wear the necklace on the outside like a bow tie or a priest's collar.
When it broke, it slid down inside my shirt, warm against my skin. I removed it carefully, holding both ends of the thin artificial sinew thread that had supported it for so long. I carried it carefully so that the hand-cut wooden segments wouldn't slip off, and put the whole thing in a bowl. I remember it piling in like water. I've meant to fix the necklace. Elizabeth has meant to fix it. But neither of us has, maybe because it broke around the time when I started wearing to work or school more shirts with collars, around the time we got pregnant with Sonora. Maybe we haven't fixed it because it was the last vestige of a stage in our lives that is forever gone.
The weird thing, though, is that I still see myself as that person, the one backpacking through Europe and sleeping in random clusters of trees, the one who got excited to go on multi-day "primitive" hikes with teenagers, the one who would wear knee-high mocassins and carry a hand-made leather bag on a cross-continental flight. When people don't recognize that younger me, I am surprised, not because I'm made aware that I'm getting old and fat, but because people no longer recognize a part of me I consider essential to my collective identity.
I think we still struggle to resist convention and analyze life, but it happens in such benign ways as to be almost imperceptible. We diaper the baby in re-usable cloth. We only mow our lawn once or twice a month. I bike to work most days. We don't have TV. Elizabeth grinds wheat and wears socks with her skirt to church. Sometimes I wear Chacos sandals with my slacks. But in most ways, we are bland, normal, main stream.
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A few months after we got back from Germany, before we had been married a year, Elizabeth and I were backpacking in southern Utah. As we were climbing out of a large sandstone valley in the Escalante drainage area, we paused when we noticed beach-like ripples in the rock. The ripples continued on subtly at that same altitude for as far as we could see. This was part of some prehistoric lake, a great body of water. Probably, buried deep in the stone, there were millions of fossils of sea life: shells and plants and fish vertebrae. But to most people, this was only a desert. Shrubs clung to sandy depressions, but the water was gone. Hard, mature stone stared back at us. We were thirsty, and we hiked on.
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