ONCE UPON A TIME

At coffee the other day, one of the guys asked me if I ever started any of my columns out with “Once upon a time.” I don’t remember what I told him, but it got me thinking about the words and what they mean to me. To me, “Once upon a time,” conjures up a story I want to tell. The very word conjure can mean something mystical or magical but it also can mean a reflection brought on by a scent, sound taste or anything that takes you back in your mind to “Once upon a time.” Put another way—it’s just a memory.

I have received some criticism for writing about the past so much. “It’s done and finished,” they say, and now it’s time to move on. But the future for each of us is different—and especially for those people who, to put it bluntly, don’t have a lot of tomorrow’s to draw on. For you see, there comes a time in your life when you’re satisfied with where you have been, and what you have done. You’re not exactly ready to cash it in yet, but when they tell you it’s time to start taking money out of your 401k instead of putting it in—well, the handwriting is on the wall. Old age is a time when many of us are stripped of our titles, dignities and maybe our driver’s license, but no matter how much they try, they can’t take our memories away.

Writers write mostly from their experiences or someone else’s observations. After all, if something hadn’t happened—what would there be to write about? Mark Twain didn’t gain all that wit he shared with us when he was in his twenty’s. He accumulated it over his lifetime. The biggest shame is that he didn’t live to be a hundred, for who knows what else he would have penned. To be smart is to retain what you have seen, heard and experienced—be it “once upon a time.” The only travesty for a lot of us is, just when we have seen and experienced most everything, we lose that God-given ability to remember things. It’s my experience, however, that the memories you lose most often are the things that just happened, and not the memories you cherish and never forget. Those are so ingrained in your mind you will never lose them. Maybe it’s your mind’s way of saying, “I’ll remember the important things. You’ll find your keys eventually.” Years ago, Frank Sinatra sang a song called “Once upon a Time” that says it all for me when it comes to a certain memory I have.

Once upon a time a girl with moonlight in her eyes. Put her hand in mine and said she loved me so. But that was once upon a time, many years ago.

Once upon a time the world was sweeter than we knew. Everything was ours, how happy we were then. But somehow once upon a time, never comes again.

To those of you who are still making most of your memories, those lyrics might not mean much to you right now. Your “once upon a time’s” are just a yesterday away. Your tomorrows seem to stretch out forever, and really, all that is important is the here and now. Believe me, however, time has a way of slip sliding away and before you know it, you too might be sitting at your keyboard and typing, “Once upon a time.”