Stranger Than Fiction: the Crossovers of Life
Have you ever experienced crossovers of different parts of your life? Like when you, as an adult, encounter a person, place, smell, object, song, or emotion exclusive to your childhood or teenage years?
I think a common example of this phenomenon would be attending a school reunion with someone met post-graduation. That someone is entirely unrelated to your school and your experiences at that school until suddenly they are walking its halls/campus and interacting with your former classmates or teachers. Your teenage/young adult life mixes – or crosses over – with your adult life in, what I frequently find to be, a jarring, surreal, and downright weird experience.
I don’t know about you but I feel different segments of my life quite viscerally
Each segment has a distinct beginning and ending. In fact, when ending one chapter, I feel like that part of my being dies and I am reborn when starting a new chapter.
Stupid and cheesy, I know. But I can’t help what I feel…a sentiment which is also stupid and cheesy…
As a result, when an element of my past crosses over into my present, it feels like a ghost has appeared or like I’m time-traveling to another life.
In the past ten years, these crossover events have happened more frequently…
…probably because I now have several different segments of my life under my belt. A few crossover examples include:
1. Playing a harp recital in my hometown church with my college harp teacher
2. Returning to live in the city in which I grew up (different place from my hometown)
3. Meeting my parents at my college campus for a concert
4. Seeing my college professors from Iowa at a music therapy conference in Minnesota
5. Meeting a bunch of older ladies from my hometown church at a public garden in my current city-of-residence
Of these, examples 1 and 5 felt particularly bizarre
In example 1, the church of my childhood suddenly melded with the most important figure of my college years. The musty smell of the sanctuary where my 4-year-old self sat beside my grandma and played with dolls each Sunday collided with the perfumed authority that intimidated my 20-year-old self in the practice rooms of Cox-Snow Music Building every Thursday. The commanding voice of my professor reverberated in tandem with the demure (?) utterances of my mother, great-aunt, and childhood neighbors. The remembered outbursts of past congregational song vibrated in sympathy with harp strings of the present.
During this recital, I felt both a child and young adult, both naïve and knowledgeable, both incompetent and confident, both new and known.
And it was weird as fuck.
The next crossover was just as odd
During this experience, I met my mother and several older ladies from the aforementioned church (which I’m now realizing has been a significant part of my life) at a public botanical garden in the city I recently moved to. How crazy was it to walk the beautiful grounds of this place as an adult only to run into a former Sunday School teacher? And how disorienting was it to be admiring the campanile I’d driven by so often while running errands, only to have the view obscured by the tight, grey perm of a past church choir associate?
Oh, plus, that very day the garden was hosting a quilt exhibit which just happened to be attended by one of my knitting friends from college! So this one event combined people from my youth, college days, (italics) and adulthood!
To top off the whole crazy occasion, the ladies and I went to a popular restaurant in town for lunch where I took in the sites and smells that had burned themselves into my adult memory while listening to conversation regarding the sites (but not really smells) of my childhood.
I just can’t get over the bizarreness of crossovers
I’m not sure if everyone experiences them as deeply as I do, or if everyone is quite as impacted by them. They are certainly a unique aspect of life, or rather, a unique aspect of all the many lives we live.
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