‘Tracking Time’ by Timothy Kenny

: Near Past

George, Chris and I stood outside the door to the Soviet-built apartment block in Kostenai, Kazakhstan, blowing on our hands. It was early evening in early fall, not cold for the Central Asian steppe but not warm either. We weren’t dressed for temps sliding into the lower forties. The air carried the smell of snow.

We had been pre-gaming, as the kids say, but were lucid, expectant, a bit uncertain about what we’d find at the party under way on the third floor.

In his reporting days George lived in Moscow and traveled throughout the former Soviet Union. He had also attended parties thrown by the head of the journalism department at Kostenai State University, whose apartment we were about to enter. He provided a heads up.

‘Look, fellas,’ he said. ‘There will be several middle-aged women at this party. Some of them like to drink.’ He paused. ‘Okay, almost all of them like to drink. They may or may not get carried away. They may or may not be married, but it doesn’t matter. Be on your guard. We are Americans. We are fair game. All of us. I’m serious about this.’

He looked both of us in the eye.

‘You get me, right?’

We did, in an American sort of way. It was not my first trip to Kazakhstan, but social norms in Central Asia remained obscure. Nevertheless, Chris and I nodded, as if we understood precisely what George meant.

‘Above all else,’ he added, ‘We have got to stick together.’

We laughed. People often did around George.

*

Not long ago I attended a memorial service held for George at a prep school called The Gunnery in Washington, Connecticut, the town where he lived. George and I had spent enough time together to know and like each other. I had driven over from my eastern Connecticut home to attend the service because I admired George, both for his work as an Associated Press foreign correspondent and for his career afterwards, when he co-founded a well-respected journalism training centre in Washington, D.C., that fostered the profession in Eastern Europe.

My intention was to tell our Kostenai story at the service, thinking it might be amusing or provide some insight about George, a big-hearted man who liked good conversation. I could not, however. As I listened to one speaker after another talk about George, highlighting his wisdom, generosity and accomplishments, I was seized by unexpected emotion. I decided against telling my story, fearful I might break down in front of a roomful of strangers.

As I left the service I stopped to introduce myself to one of George’s adult children, a woman who had spoken eloquently about her father. She seemed pleased that I had come, glad to meet one of George’s journalism friends. After a few short minutes I stuck out my hand to say goodbye, when I was flooded by another swell of emotion and struggled to maintain my composure.

She smiled and touched my shoulder. ‘It’s a hard time for all of us,’ she said. I managed an apology, embarrassed that I had forced this grieving woman to console me at her father’s memorial service.

I hurried off, red-faced.

*

George’s death has become a marker of sorts for me, a kind of placeholder to remind me how quickly time present folds into time past. His death leaves me with a dwindling number of connections to Central Asia and a professional journalism life frequently spent on the road.

The thread of time that connects us to our past selves thins along with our recollections. We tend to believe that memory helps us sift through the uncharted course ahead, that it serves as a guidepost, not realizing that both ends of time – the past and its future – are constantly moving.

*

: Past

My grandparents’ grave marker is granite grey and lies flat against the unclipped grass that crowds its edges. We came to inspect this new stone, my cousins Sharon and Don and I. My grandparents were buried side by side thirty-one years apart, my grandfather in 1933, my grandmother in 1964, their existence left unmarked in a pretty Catholic cemetery called Mt. Olivet on Detroit’s east side, long years and many miles from their native Scotland.

The mystery of why their gravesite was left unmarked for so long remains unsolved, despite boundless family speculation. Don found the stone after we tramped aimlessly in the wrong part of the cemetery.

‘Here it is,’ he said quietly, a man now so different from the rowdy, funny child I remember growing up. His family lived one block over from ours, in a house ten miles north of Detroit once owned by my mother’s parents.

Don’s sister Sharon and I stood together, reading the names and dates of our grandparents’ births and deaths, as if we were orphans who had stumbled upon an unknown past of just-discovered relatives. We never met my grandfather, who died before we arrived in the world, but we well remember our grandmother, whose soft Scottish brogue could be indecipherable to us as children. She was a kind woman, tall and pretty even in old age, forced by circumstance to live with her sons and daughter in a rotating cycle as she grew older.

We plucked grass away from the stone with our hands and took pictures of it and of each other. We looked around and mentally marked its position in the cemetery in case we returned, even as we knew that was unlikely.

We told each other we liked the stone and were happy to have bought it. Sharon took photos of deer grazing a few yards away, a bucolic scene wildly at odds with the broken streets and empty lots just beyond the cemetery’s wrought iron fence. We had talked of holding a brief memorial service but did not – uncertain, perhaps embarrassed, about what we should say.

We knew when and where our grandparents were born and how and where they died, yet Don had discovered that no stone marked their burial place the first time he visited Mt. Olivet.

Such inattention unnerved me, as it did my two brothers and two sisters and my first cousins, Don and Sharon and their three brothers. We found it surprising that our fathers and uncles had allowed such an oversight in a Catholic family so attuned to the ceremonies of death and its attendant details.

Our grandfather, whose name was the same as my father’s, John Andrew Kenny, was born in 1881 in Denny, Scotland. My grandmother, Catherine McGowan, came from nearby New Kilpatrick. She was born in 1878. My grandparents’ five children included a girl named Catherine, who died at age seven from rheumatic fever. My grandfather was buried in a plot owned by a man named Kelly, who lived in the same Detroit duplex as my grandparents after their arrival from Scotland. It was the height of the American Depression, which may explain why his grave remained unmarked for so long.

What puzzled us was why no stone was placed when my grandmother was buried three decades later. My wife Susan blames the oversight on the death of my aunt Alice, the only living daughter, who died of cancer in 1959. Daughters, she believes, tend to take the reigns of family responsibility in such matters. It’s as good an explanation as any.

*

John and Catherine Kenny’s ten living grandchildren paid $74.33 each to buy what the cemetery calls a ‘Barre Gray Granite’ gravestone, engraved with the image of a thistle in the upper left hand corner and the lower right. It is twenty-four inches wide by twelve high and four inches deep, with ‘frosting in panel’.

It reads:

KENNY

John Andrew Catherine McGowan

Dec 23, 1883 – May 29, 1933 June 14, 1888 – Dec 26, 1964

My family knows surprisingly little about our grandparents’ immigrant lives in Detroit. They were practicing Catholics originally from Ireland, who entered the United States through Boston. The facts of how they lived through ordinary days and unusual ones seem unrecoverable, diluted by time, one generation out of reach.

The gravestone we bought is terse and insufficient in its summation of their lives, but it has been placed where it belongs. One day it will wear away, crumble, and disappear. That will take a while, though.

Granite, I am told, can last centuries.

*

: Far Past

Anxiety was palpable at my fiftieth high school reunion, as was a vague sense of remorse. Uncertainty was also in evidence: about who we were, what we had become, why we were even here, so many decades into adulthood.

My friend Suzanne urged me to attend after I said I would not. I had gone to our tenth reunion in Royal Oak, Michigan, and thought that was enough.

‘We need to talk this through,’ she wrote in an email. ‘I completely share your aversion to parts of this deal. Do not go there is ringing in my ears as well. And I haven’t even seen the reunion booklet. However, the clock is ticking and how many more times (none) we will get to see the few people that we want to see?’

‘So if it sucks, we leave.’

Suzanne and I were close in high school. We never dated but I spent lots of time at her house. She once convinced me to escort a tall, shy girl who had been voted Homecoming Queen to our Homecoming Weekend festivities. The queen did not have a boyfriend. I am tall and did not play football in high school so Suzanne believed I was the perfect escort for the tall, shy girl.

At the reunion I apologized to this woman, who I now knew even less, for what I recalled as my escort inadequacies. Earlier that evening I had apologized to a guy I worked with on the school’s grounds crew over summer. I had teased him because he always insisted on sharpening his shovel before he used it. He was a quiet guy, smart and quirky then and now, and he said the same thing to me at the reunion after my apology that he did when we were in high school: ‘Can’t dig with a dull spade.’

I didn’t know what to make of his comment, nor did I know what to make of my own awkward apology to the homecoming queen. She paused after hearing it, perhaps remembering the entire weekend in single moment. She sighed.

‘Suzanne set that up, do you remember? She grabbed you in the hallway one day and made you promise to go with me. You were right across the hall from me. I barely knew you. I was so embarrassed. I was right there when she did it.’

She sounded embarrassed still. I realize my attempts to rectify the social inadequacies of an awkward teenager were misguided if not silly. I also knew I could never attend another reunion.

*

Time that stretches back decades, say to high school fifty years ago, is quite different than time recently passed. Things change in memory. The more we recall past events the more we tend to alter our original memory. The hippocampus has a difficult job. It pulls what we remember from not one place but from three, recalling what happened, where it happened and when it happened, then merging all three recollections into a comprehensive thought.

Over time we tend to lose the sharp details that coloured the original event and rewrite the past with what we believe to be true, filling in the gaps that have changed our memories ever so slightly. When we remember, we remember the last time we recalled the event. We do not remember the original event itself.

As a reporter covering the siege of Sarajevo in the summer of 1992 I assumed my recollections of that stark and dangerous trip would never fade, that I would always recall with utter clarity what had occurred. I find now that it’s better if I refer to notes if I want to be certain of my facts.

My friendship with George holds more value for me than the lost friendships of my high school years, which I find odd. It’s as though the past that helped form who I am now matters little. The death in 1914 of my grandparents’ seven-year-old daughter is more understandable to me and feels closer in time in many ways than my own childhood, which I recall only obliquely, as if I am looking at postcards sent from places I have never seen.

Keeping track of time and its meaning – when and how it slows or moves too quickly – grows more difficult the older I get. It’s almost as if there is no time at all.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Timothy Kenny is a former newspaperman, Fulbright scholar and journalism professor. His nonfiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Irish Pages, The Kenyon Review Online, Green Mountains Review, The Galway Review and elsewhere. His collection of nonfiction essays, Far Country, Stories From Abroad and Other Places, was published in 2015.