Yesterday and Today by Rev Glynn Cardy

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Throughout my childhood my grandmother, for special occasions, would make coconut ice.  It was sublime, and moreish!  In my teens I got her to write the recipe down (she didn’t use a recipe book), and then show me how she made it.  

All of which I remember fondly. Her laughter.  Her stirring spoon. The right temperature, the right timing, the right setting.  And above all that taste, texture, and addictive allure.

I don’t though remember much else.  Including the recipe.  In oral form, or the whereabouts of the written form.  Alas, my grandmother’s perfect coconut ice has been lost to time.

Yet this didn’t stop me from searching.

For many years I would go to church fairs, or frequent farmers’ markets, to try and find that perfect piece of coconut ice.  If passing a sweet shop, I would go in and sample or buy their coconut ice.  In New Zealand, overseas, wherever, whenever I could.

Then one day I just gave up.  Just like that.  I stopped.  And the sweet stalls and shops lost their irregular itinerant best customer.

It wasn’t that my adult self had won the argument with my teenage self.  Or that my dentist self had won me over in spite of my addictive self.  Or that I’d seen sense, or had an epiphany, or realized that seeking a past perfection is ultimately futile.

No, I just stopped because I wanted to experience the now without having to constantly compare it to the past.

Or put another way, I didn’t want to keep on trying to find or recreate what was.  Rather I just wanted to absorb and appreciate what is.  I wanted to live more in the now.  And while respecting the past, also leave it behind.

Is this a thing that comes with aging?  That thing that comes with realizing that you’re not going to live forever, and then letting your sense of mortality motivate you to live more fully, more in the present, rather than trying to recreate a feeling or a taste from childhood?

Not that there weren’t good things in my childhood, you understand.  But who wants to live forever in those memories.  Or be guided, or subtly controlled, by those memories.  Why not make new memories, with new people, in new situations, now?

I was thinking about all this as I was listening to that Beatles classic love song Yesterday, which laments the imperfection of the now with the supposed perfection of yesterday.  Only the song is a bit more complicated than that.  The lyrics hint that the past has shaped the present into what it is, the ‘perfect’ giving rise to the ‘imperfect.’  And the “longing for yesterday,” McCartney has recently said, was about wronging his mother and wishing he could now apologize to her.

Which is to say the relationship between yesterday and today is complicated, and it’s time to put away notions of perfect and imperfect.

Meanwhile, I’m over coconut ice.  ‘Iced out’ as they say.  I’ve moved on to coffee.

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