Some Other Time

Reflecting on doors not opened, I wonder what I could have known that is now lost.

If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

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Today is November 1st, which means it has been five months since Enzo’s passing. In this time, I have considered many things about our lives together: trips taken, moments shared, and words spoken. One thought that occupies me as I contemplate our past is how many things about him I could have known but did not pause to learn. It is a question that occupies me often, as I reflect on all that could have been but was not.

A couple of years ago, Enzo came to me and asked me whether I would buy him the equipment he needed to DJ for a party. I said I would, assuming that he intended to use it for evenings with his high school friends. After his death, one of his former teachers explained how she had run into Enzo one day on campus—unusually, the school he attended most of his life begins at the age of three and continues all the way through high school—and asked him to help set up a room for a dance she was organizing for her students, most of whom were ten or eleven years old. Enzo was glad to help and asked how she planned to organize the music. His teacher replied that she would use her phone and some small speakers, at which point Enzo immediately offered to DJ the festivities. Since that day, whenever this teacher organized a party for the younger kids at the school, Enzo helped set up the room and DJ’d for the evening. It was to help his old teacher that he had asked me for the gift, a simple act of generosity I did not learn of until after he was gone.

One of his high school classmates told me that she had experienced a year of severe depression, explaining that Enzo had been at her side through that difficult time. “He always checked on me, always made sure I joined in when our group of friends got together. He never forgot about me,” she recounted, almost in tears, “and I would not have made it through that year without him.” Hearing her words, I recalled Enzo’s brief mention of a “friend who was a little down and needed his help” from time to time, but he did not say much more and I did not ask. There he was, caring for another, and I did not stop to care for him, thinking to myself that his task was a minor one, something he would handle with the calm ease with which he moved through the world.

Shortly before he died, Enzo told me that his university was arranging a field trip to New York City to visit the offices of HBO Sports and those of a few of the major sports leagues. It sounded great, I told him, and I was impressed that the school would bring so large a group to New York. After Enzo’s death, I met with the Dean of the Sports Journalism program at the University of Maryland who asked me whether I had heard about Enzo’s trip to New York City. I told him that I had, commenting that it must have been a challenge to arrange access for so many students. The Dean paused before telling me that only six students had made the trip: three seniors, two juniors, and Enzo. “He was the only freshman we took,” he said, “and it’s something we’d never done before. We debated it beforehand, but there was something about Enzo that made us want to show him to the leagues as an example of the kinds of students we have. I think the executives who met him thought he was much older,” the Dean said with a smile, “and he probably could have gotten a job on that trip if he had asked.”

Enzo said nothing about being the only first-year student on the trip, and I had not asked if he was. I simply assumed that I knew what was happening at this moment in his life and moved on to other thoughts after he returned from New York, thinking that we had all the time in the world to discuss these matters in the future.

As I reflect on similar moments over the years, I see now that I was, at times, a father passing through a long hallway of unlocked doors that I never stopped to open, either because I assumed I knew what I would find or because I thought I could open them in the future. I now realize that this is the nature of parenthood: we often stand on the brink of entering into some region of our children’s world but we turn away. We need only to take one more step to find ourselves in the minds and lives of our children, yet our complacency, labors, or other distractions prevent us from doing so, as we imagine that the conversation we just postponed with our child will take place in the future.

“Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart,” wrote Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time, and “what barrier is there so insurmountable as silence?” Was it a silence that kept me from opening a door, the silly expectation of an invitation I need never have sought? Did I occasionally mistake Enzo’s fluid nonchalance for indifference? Did I imagine that Enzo would always share with me anything of real consequence? Whatever the answer, it makes me sad to think about all the discoveries I could have made in those rooms that are now forever closed, destined to remain in my imagination only—a world of words never spoken or heard.

We leave doors closed not just of our children, of course. We often make the same decision with family or friends, sometimes consciously but usually because we conclude that we shall open them—just not today.

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience,” Proust also wrote. “None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

Proust’s words echoed in my mind this past weekend, for some lost friends—dear to me in my youth and from whom I had not heard in a long time—contacted me after reading about Enzo’s death. We reconnected, looked at each other on the computer screen, noted the passage of time, and lamented not having spoken long ago, while Enzo was alive, so that they could have known for themselves the quiet young man who kept his world private but never hidden. “We’re sorry it took so long to reach out; let’s talk again soon,” one voice said at the end of our call. “I am easy to find,” I replied with a smile—a door, like Enzo, easily opened.

It was for me, as it usually is these days with all such calls, a melancholy moment. When it was over, I sat in my office, reflecting on consolations offered by old friends suddenly stepping forward out of the mists of time. With their words echoing in my mind, I walked to my piano and began to play “Some other time.” In the song, two people ruminate on the passing of their lives, noting all those things that they wish to say to each other but haven’t the time. In the song, I hear the echo of those moments when I told myself there was so much time ahead, not knowing the thread of Enzo’s life would soon be cut.

I do not give advice in these brief essays, for it is not my place to do so. I will note that if there are doors through which you may still enter in the lives of your children, consider doing so the next time you pass them. Inside, you may discover a beautiful story waiting to be told or a special moment waiting to be shared. Another time may come to do so, but that moment may also, as it did for me, disappear with the whisper of a summer breeze.

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“Some other time”

Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to;
Oh well—we’ll catch up some other time.

This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken;
Oh well—we’ll catch up some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Comes the time for parting;
But, let’s just be glad for what we’ve had
And what's to come.

There’s so much more embracing,
Still to be done, but time is racing;
Oh well—we’ll catch up some other time.

There’s so much more embracing,
Still to be done, but time is racing;
Oh—oh well, we’ll catch up some other time.