... we get to thinking of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. -Paul Bowles
Just sitting here watching the finale of ER has made me a little melancholy tonight. (Actually I gave up watching the show several years ago after the writers were continually pushing their liberal social agenda, but that is a story for another post.) The preview show where they showed all the old clips actually made me cry (especially the flashbacks to Dr. Greene dying, Carter and Lucy getting stabbed, and Dr. Ross and Nurse Hathaway's reunion). Every Thursday night I would look so forward to watching ER, sometimes by myself or with Sam and sometimes with friends. Everyone I knew watched it and we always discussed it around the water cooler on Friday mornings.
When the show started we were still living in the 90's. 1994 to be exact. We were two 25-year olds, married 3 years and living in Minneapolis. I was just starting grad school. The thought of having kids wasn't even an idea that was being entertained. There were lots of long conversations about our hopes and dreams for the future.
Flash forward (and it does seem like a flash) and now we are in the 2000's. (Is that still weird to anyone else?) We will be celebrating our 18th anniversary this summer (as 40 year olds?!). My graduate degree is not much more than a certificate in a frame and good memories of a wonderful learning experience. After 8 years of navigating this maze called parenting, the magnitude of the task still seems overwhelming at times. Many of the dreams of our youth have died leaving more realistic, adult if you will, expectations and realizations in their place.
Things like a tv show ending are not important but the conclusion of this one has helped me mark the passage of time. I guess that's why a few tears have been shed around here tonight.
2 comments:
sherilyn, great post! i had forgotten how long it has been. i remember when it started, it had a lot of hype and i didn't want to get caught up in it and then i went ahead and did anyway. crazy.
i have been thinking about the scary responsibility of parenting a lot also...
i too got teary during the retrospective. until you said 1994, i hadn't thought about how long ago it all started. life before kids and being married seems to be lost in a fog a long, long time ago but i clearly remember er. what does that say about how my brain works?
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