It’s a Whole Thing

I bought this cookie sheet twenty years ago. It was non-stick. The water used to fly right off it. To dry it, all I had to do was turn and gently wave it.  Boom. Done. I remember making cookies on it. They never stuck. The thing was true to its name. 

Not anymore. Stuff sticks to it and I scrub it off. It didn’t look like this either. It was shiny metal, the color of a fancy laptop. It did not transform in a day. It became what it is now slowly over the decades. 

Having had it all this time though, I can still see what it was at the beginning.  It still serves its function perfectly. It requires extra clean-up and it looks its age but other than that it’s no different. It’s still really the same. 

People are like this now to me. I can look at a middle-aged person, like me, and project backwards to when they were younger. I can look at a young person and have a good idea of how they will look when they get to be my age. I’ve observed myself and people in my life over the decades. It’s not that no one changes; it’s that they really stay the same.

Mostly, this is about aging, of course. Maybe the point is, something that looks old and crusty and ready to get rid of was at one time, bright and shiny and non-stick. But I think it’s really about learning to see something, someone, more universally; to see them as existing at one point on a line that stretches backward and forward. A whole thing.