Dear myself, 54 years older

By the time my fiftieth Harvard Reunion rolls around I'll be 72. I'll be grumpy, arthritic and most likely senile. I'll be old, actually really really old. Isn't that a revelation?

What will half a century of life have meant to me? I can't really imagine myself as old. I can't imagine myself without youthful acne and a head full of hair. It's outside of my ken, beyond the expansive scope of my imagination.

So instead of speculating on what old me would want to know about young me (because by then the two will be distant cousins, hazy in each others minds) I will focus my energies on the now, on the daily passage of life and all the things I want to salvage, to store away indefinitely in some vault up in the sky so that they will never fade.

If I were given a time capsule and told to fill it with my freshman year first semester I'd fill it up with pictures and trinkets and spent charlie cards to Wonderland and Davis Square. There would be meal receipts from the Kong (crumpled and smeared with duck sauce), retail receipts from Urban Outfitters and H&M (guiltily stowed in my wallet), a Harvard ID lost in Rhode Island, Chinese language dialogues and empty solo cups. There would be a hand full of dessicated leaves, their color long faded away, reminders of an autumn long passed. There would be squash from Annenberg and bowlfuls of cereal, lived in gray sweats and a pair of dirt caked hiking boots. There would be pictures of me jumping off the foot bridge into the Charles and others of me on my precarious balcony overlooking the yard. There would be books stacked on top of books and a sheaf of paper scrawled in two different languages.

My time capsule would most likely be unintelligible to you or Lynelle or Michael or anyone else I've come to know over these past few months. We may share this campus, this view of autumn in Boston; our experiences may even intersect tentatively at times, crossing paths like polite strangers on the T, a nod of acknowledgment, a conspiratory grin telegraphed among friends, but the narration of our experiences is categorically different. And the memories that protrude most in our minds are certainly all not one in the same. But there is a continuity there. I know that there are people here who have shared my life just as I have shared theirs. Though our exact memories of this fall may diverge, we share a basis of sorts, a collective memory that enlivens our conversations and makes us feel safe, included, known.

How this will all translate into my motley compilation of keepsakes is unknown.

In this treasure trove of memories I could perhaps discern some trace of the feckless youth I maybe once was. In retrospect I might smile with chagrin, or humor, or with a bitter note of sadness. Or I may furrow my brow wonderingly and marvel at how very much the mind lets slip as the years progress.