Not Important, Urgent

It has been a while since I've posted anything here. I've thought about it, worried about it. But something more urgent always seemed to demand my attention. Not important, mind you. Urgent. So much of life is like that. The really important things slip by while I'm rushing to take care of the most recent piece of urgent trivia. "Getting and spending, we lay waste our days..." lines recalled from Miss Sachs's English class at Wilmington Friends School. I have no idea where they came from, who the author was, but for some reason they have stuck with me over the years. I have managed to law waste a good many years in this manner. I have made false start after false start, only to get bogged down in detail or to succumb to one distraction or another. Meanwhile, my sister Betty, finding time on her hands after the death of her husband, began jotting down notes every day or so on whatever paper she had at hand. She wrote down whatever happened to be in her head -- something she remembered from childhood, a fragment of a poem she had committed to memory years ago, something she had written herself. She didn't try to assemble these bits and pieces into any kind of order or form. She just got them down on paper before she was distracted by some supposedly urgent matter or unproductive compulsion. I really admired her for what she was doing. Confined to an "assisted living facility" for the last decade of her life, she didn't have access to any wondrous electronic device like the Ipad on which this is being written. She didn't even have a typewriter. Half-blind, she struggled painfully with pen and paper to compile her thoughts and memories. She was an artist and a poet. She had lots of talent, but very little confidence. Why? She lived for many years in the shadow of her husband, a gifted architect and water colorist. And she reared two boys and a girl, sparing little time and energy for herself in her determination to give them a happier home than the one in which she (and I) grew up. As a child, there is no doubt in my mind that she felt forced to play second fiddle to her brilliant older brother. And as a teen-ager she assumed many of the responsibilities that would have been my mother's if she had been able. These included looking after me, a sickly child who came into the family's life more than 12 years after my youngest sibling. By the time her kids were grown and gone, my sister's self-confidence was worn to a nub. She struggled to paint, but little or nothing came of her efforts. If she wrote at all, she left nothing behind save the notebooks she compiled in her last years. In its way, it was a gallant effort that she made there in the snug little room that was her last home. As old age closes in, it isn't easy to capture memories of years past with any great confidence in their accuracy. Is that the way things really were? Or is it the way we wished they had been?