Lost Opportunity

My grandmother told me there was a perfect age at which to memorize poetry. Unfortunately I cannot remember the exact age, but judging from her propensity for poetry recitation, I know she was right. She memorized many poems in her youth and remembered them for as long as she lived. She could recite long passages from Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” and just about anything Tennyson ever wrote. After she lost her sight I enjoyed reading aloud to her and wasn’t too surprised when she could recite most of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” with me as I read.

I must have been at that perfect age for memorizing poetry when I learned “Three Things Come Not Back” (author unknown) as I can still recall the poem today.

Remember three things come not back:
The arrow sent upon its track
It will not swerve, it will not stay
Its speed: it flies to wound or slay.

The spoken word, so soon forgot
By thee; but it has perished not;
In other hearts ‘tis living still
And doing work for good or ill.

And the lost opportunity
That cometh back no more to thee
In vain thou weep’st, in vain dost yearn
These three shall never more return.

Today it is the lost opportunity which haunts me. I missed so many opportunities when I stopped writing last December. My blog is allegedly about cleaning house and I missed the chance to write about actually doing it. In the months between March and July I completely purged and cleaned the home I’d lived in for almost thirty years (yes, even the garage) in order to put it on the real estate market. (Maybe not writing about it enabled me to get it done.)

The move would have been excellent blog fodder. Packing, deciding what to keep and what to let go, schlepping my “stuff” 170 miles downstate, dealing with moving day and movers in their semi-truck size van – all would have made great blog material.

But the event I’m saddest I didn’t write about was the death, at 104, of Big Red, my beloved grandmother. I didn’t document my thoughts and feelings. I didn’t put on paper that I really believed she would live forever, that we’d seen her decline and rally so many times in the past this time couldn’t be “it,” or that I was three hours away on the morning of her death and made it to her just before she passed.

Big Red is gone, but her spirit lives on. Her spirit will be in every poem I read and in the voice of every child reciting the verse which they memorized at just the right age.