There are certain inevitabilities in life. The obvious ones -- growing, aging, dying -- can be hard to take, but I'm finding it's the more subtle inevitabilities that really mess with me. The latest reared its ugly head during a holiday visit home; I heard the words, "I can't believe how big you've gotten!" and realized they had come from my own mouth. Not from Great Aunt Sylvia's crinkled lips, or the ho-ho-ho-ing depths of the next-door neighbor's belly. From my mouth, which, after I'd realized what I'd done, hung open, slack with the shock of having been an unwilling accomplice in what amounts to a high crime for a former child like me. How many times during my youth had I heard those words and lamented the misfortune of every adult in the world, who, just by virtue of age, seemed unwittingly trapped in the Land of the Boring and Tired? How many times had I sworn, at all costs, to avoid such a fate? And yet, here I was dispatching new and exciting observations from that very land.

That's the thing about inevitabilities. When faced with a 17-year-old who was, only yesterday it seems, thumping down her porch steps backward, diapered tushy in the air, there's suddenly no other choice but to say something silly and geriatric. It is, despite our better judgment, inevitable.

Because I now live 3000 miles from the city where I spent the first 18 years of my life, returning home seems to shine a cosmic spotlight on life's inevitabilities, namely the passage of time. Most of my visits are spent catching up on what's happened while I've been away -- and again, the seemingly less-significant changes often weigh in as heavily as life-cycle events. The closing of a restaurant -- even one for which I had never held any special affection, but which I had nevertheless expected would always be there -- can make me as nostalgic as news of a childhood friend who has married, or a teacher who has died. Understanding these sorts of events to be inevitable over the course of years doesn't protect me from the surprise, upon hearing of them, that time, as predicted and promised, has passed.

Perhaps this should all be obvious. And when you see change happening on a day-to-day basis, it makes sense. Sometimes it barely registers. But it's a jolt to return home only once a year to see that time, even when you are not there to witness it, is moving on. It is not unlike watching life happen in still photographs, rather than as a moving picture. And while the still photographs can be poignant, even beautiful, the moving picture is a lot easier to take. I am sometimes deluded into thinking that in a city far from where I grew up, I am safe from some of life's harder inevitabilities. In my new home -- where I have no first-grade teachers, no lifelong friends, no neighbors who babysat me through my childhood -- there is less of an established landscape, fewer fixtures that, if displaced, would be cause for alarm. Of course, life is no less inevitable where I live now. But with my past residing so far away, it sometimes seems like it is.

So every year when I return home, to my past, to this city, I see the still photographs that prove, beyond a doubt, that for all our attempts to figure things out or just get through the day, time moves heedlessly forward. It's not light stuff. But there is beauty in it, in seeing the way everything is unfurled in this unstoppable procession. In looking across the table at a childhood friend, each knowing that, despite our promises to each other and to ourselves, we have grown older, and realizing that, to our surprise, we don't really mind. That we still look forward to the things to come -- though they may be very different from the events we anticipated as children -- and that after these things have passed, there will be yet others. That even under the weight of life's inevitabilities, there will be sweet moments in the day, with family and friends, by myself on a street whose every incline and bend is familiar.

This year, on my last day at home, I went out for lunch with my oldest and closest friend, and, over the kind of bagels you just don't find in California, we caught up on the changes in our lives and in our hometown. Next to us sat two elderly women, the kind of women people often try to ignore, as if hoping to escape old age by pretending it doesn't exist. But there were a few moments when their conversation, amid the clinking of dishes and buzz of families, was the only decipherable sound.

"I guess it's just the passage of time, Ruth. The passage of time," said the woman facing me. And, it being one of those moments when the particulars are completely beside the point, her meaning was clear. "Did you hear that?" I asked my friend, my voice low. She nodded, said nothing. We sat there for a little while, silent, until the woman, before getting up to leave, looked across the table at her friend. "It's been such a lovely afternoon, Ruth," she said. "Really. A lovely afternoon."

And it was.

Rebecca Wieder can be reached at rebezca@juno.com.

Issue Date: January 24 - 30, 2003