A Spanish friend, my running partner, joined me this summer on my yearly visit to the States. Our first stop was Magdalena, New Mexico, where my mother has lived for 25 years. I introduced him to some acquaintances there. Conversation was a little stilted with the first introductions because my friend speaks no English. But third try, lucky. Our friendly village council member, EMT volunteer, and bread baker asked in Spanish, right off the bat, “Do you speak English?”
My friend laughed and said he didn’t speak a word.
“You’re in luck because I speak Spanish,” the baker replied. And then he asked, “Is this your first time in New Mexico?”
“First time in New Mexico, in the United States, in a plane.” He laughed. “First time anything.”
First time anything? I smiled because that wasn’t true—how could it be? More than six decades of living will mean a lot of experiences, and a lot of firsts. He’d have a list as long as a highway. Anyone would. Doting parents often keep track, at least at the beginning: first smile, first word, first step. But those accomplishments are themselves culminations of smaller accomplishments. Before the first word came the first babblings. Before the first step was the first shaky attempt, ending in a plop as the baby falls back on its bottom, only to try again. And before the recognizable smile, all those funny puckerings and grimaces.
You can, just as easily, move not backward to the origin but in the opposite direction toward a zenith because every first will soon grow into a bigger and better iteration: first smile into first laugh, first word into first sentence, first step into first footrace into first trophy on the shelf.
But then consider all the firsts we repeat over and over, every day, in a seemingly endless cycle, starting with our first instant awake each morning. Then first birdsong, first hint of light, first fulsome breath of cool morning air when we step outside. As if each day is the first of a new voyage.
This all adds up to a lot of firsts.
Not everyone wakens to the adventure of a brand new day. For some, a new day signifies the end of the old, never to reappear. Some people seem to categorize their lives this way, in terms of lasts, not firsts. In Philip Larkin’s poem “We Met at the End of the Party,” the two lovers look opposite ways from the same juncture—the last of summer, when days grow shorter and shadows are blue. Says the other: “There’s autumn too.” Says the speaker: “Always for you what’s finished / Is nothing, and what survives / Cancels the failed, the famished, / As if we had fresh lives / From that night on.”
But we do. We name the point and time of departure. How many times in a contest do we say, “Wait! Let’s start over.” And you begin your recital of a poem or the telling of a joke again, from the beginning. This is the first day of the rest of your life, they cheerily tell us. We’re only at a new starting line.
Sometimes the last ushers in the first. This is especially true on New Year’s Eve, when the bells ring in the new year even as the old one passes, and you say goodbye to much it held: an old car junked, an old tree cut, a pet gone. The last walk with an old dog. The last time you see an old friend. Rather than resembling the start of a voyage, the days may feel like an old home shut and locked for the final time as you turn your back, leaving much behind.
A certain sadness at changes that are final should make the last time we do anything memorable. To enshrine a moment in our memory is our recompense for losing it. Or so you think until you realize we lose the memories, too. Last sunset from the roof of your college dorm, last mountain trail race, last time you felt youthful exhilaration. I can’t say when any of those occurred. Or why the last had to be the last.
Lasts can stem from the final time you were able or willing to perform certain rituals, as with my grandmother making her Christmas peanut brittle, a task that grew more difficult each year until she announced one December that this batch would be her last. Enough is enough.
For me, it was the last time I changed my own oil. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t see it coming. “Well yes, I know how to,” I told my friend. But I realized I just wouldn’t do it now, and wouldn’t do it ever again, though I didn’t remember ever making such a decision.
For him, changing the oil or the brake pads is no trouble. But running a 30K mountain race is. He simply wouldn’t. He might remember when he last ran one. But I doubt if he recalls when he was last open to running one: when exactly the shift came from willing to consider such an undertaking to the automatic rejection. He won’t recall teetering between “maybe” and “no thanks!”
Sometimes, as when a thing happens just once, first and last are the same. That will probably be my friend’s experience with his visit to the United States. So he wanted to get the most he could out of the visit. On a Saturday in early August, we decided to go beyond our usual run from the town up to the old Kelly mine. “Where to from there?” “Onward!” “But how far?” “Until where we can go no farther.” We started out at seven a.m., trotting south, carrying some Fig Newtons, sunscreen, and a bottle of water. My mother was gone for the day, so she would not be waiting at the house, worrying about when we’d return.
We were away for eight hours—five out and three back. It wasn’t that we’d come to the end of the trail, but to the end of our desire to see more. Our last step out was followed by our first of the return, and the turnaround occurred on the top of North Baldy, a peak about seven and a half miles south of Magdalena and, at close to 10,000 feet, about 3,000 feet up from the town. In all the years of visiting Magdalena, I hadn’t gotten so far or so high into the wilderness as on that trek, accompanied by someone equally inexperienced. A first. And a last—we would never return. We didn’t make that decision, but we knew. I can’t say we were much troubled.
We should be accustomed by now. Every year, on December 31, people make a collective celebration of stepping away from the past and into the future, as if stepping out of an old wrinkled outfit and donning a new one. We stand free for a moment from the errors of our past as we welcome the new day and year. We celebrate the letting go once a year, but we do it constantly, more or less aware and more or less willingly.
First or last—a new beginning, a second chance, or the end of something? So often they name the same moment. Do you face it with fear, hope, relief, or determination to do better—or something else?
My last visit to Magdalena always means my most recent. One of these days, however, my last visit will be my final one. I won’t be shocked: I will by then be accumulating lasts faster than firsts. Mountains of them building up behind me, blocking the view of the more distant landscape of the early tries and successes. And among the peaks high and low of that last range of experience still waiting will be my last collaboration with my long-time pal and running partner. Sometimes I try to imagine that moment: our last race. Even our last long training run. Even our last morning meeting up for a jog. Will we know? A 15-year collaborative struggle so far, to add another race, or just another kilometer, to our concerted effort and shared goal. Which is? To keep adding. Seems it should never end. But it will.
As John Updike’s narrator notes in “Deaths of Distant Friends,” the end is not so bad. A kind of comfort attaches to the growing lightness of being. Loss cuts you free. For Updike’s narrator, it was last ties to his old home and old life—deaths of two friends and a golden retriever named Canute. For Canute, it was a last run in the marshes, where he died of happy exertion, the wind ruffling his fur, the tides washing in and out. For me, it might be a last run up to Kelly. Last view of Magdalena from on high. Last tie holding you to a place. Last sunset. Last light.
If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to turn and walk back down, and have some memories to keep me company.
