As I have been perusing Facebook I’ve come across several posts from people on what the decade has meant to them. Breakdowns of their accomplishments and changes that life has brought them. I don’t know if I recall all the changes that this decade has brought for me but I know the major ones and they tended to happen closer to the end of the decade.
Let’s start at the start however. I don’t recall much from those early years of the decade. I do remember a couple key events. I remember watching the family business come to an end and my leaving it. I remember finding that people were not a species I wanted to work with and getting into the animal business. I remember getting our hound dog and the nuisance he was at first. He required so much training to break him of his separation anxiety. i remember saying goodbye to our Corgi, Ollie, and the many tears that were shed on that day and the days that followed. I will still occasionally wake from sleeping and reach over the side of the bed to pet him or reach down from my chair when reading to try and find his soft orange fur.
All that times blends together in a strange way and looking back at many of those memories is like watching the story of someone else. As if I am an observer to my own life. It is strange what our mind chooses to remember. I remember my two trips to Arizona but the strongest memory from those trips is misreading a sign for a Funeral Home and Crematorium as being for a Funeral Home and Creamery and thinking that is a strange combination but I am certain the mourners appreciate the ice cream.
Then came the middle of the decade and packing 34 years of my life into boxes and transferring most of them to the garbage or Goodwill and then taking what was left and shoving it into my car to move to Virginia Beach. Once in Virginia Beach the major accomplishments of the decade began. We started a business, adopted a senior dog, got a cat, took our first vacation of the decade, moved across town, said goodbye to our senior dog, had children, and now here we are.
When you write it all out it doesn’t sound like that much, but thus are our memories. The majority of our lives are unremarkable and unremembered. Daily habits and tasks that fade to the background of our minds. Most of my days are spent driving around in my car or visiting pets I visit on a routine basis. Very rarely does anything remarkable enough happen that stands out. Life is a series of routines that are occasionally interrupted by great events. Sometimes those events are tragic and traumatic and other times they are ones of great joy. And sometimes they are both.
Life has a strange way of being mostly unremarkable and unmemorable. It isn’t my fault then that I can’t remember most of the past decade. It was a lot of watching baseball for the first five years and building a business for the last five. Thus is the life of a remarkably unremarkable individual simply existing in modern society whose only hope is to continue to see the next sunrise until one day in the distant future he does not. In all reality we should hope for all the decades of our lives to be unmemorable and unremarkable because it means nothing particularly terrible happened to us.
For the next ten years I hope to watch my children grow up and have a fully pedestrian childhood filled with learning to go potty in a toilet, read, write, ride a bike, play with toy trains and cars, start elementary school, and do every other thing expected of an average to above child in modern society. I hope in ten years time to be sitting at a desk, not too dissimilar from this one, writing about how the 2020s were as unremarkable and unmemorable as the 2010s.
David Huzzard Writes 