Most people are familiar with the phrase “déjà vu.” In fact, I’d guess that most people have experienced it at one time or another. Basically, “déjà vu” is defined as “the illusion or sensation of having already experienced something that is actually being experienced for the first time.”
But what do you call the sensation of experiencing something that you’ve actually experienced before? I’m not talking about “former lives” or anything supernatural, but rather the actual occurrence, the exact repetition of something you know you’ve seen before, even though it may have been years, or even decades ago.
I had such an experience a few days ago while visiting some friends in South Orleans on the shores of Pleasant Bay. As I’ve mentioned before in my essays, I first came to Cape Cod in my college years, working as a counselor at Camp Viking, one of the dozen-or-so sailing camps that flourished along the shores of Pleasant Bay in the 1960s. Among the campers in those days were three young identical triplets – Paul, Bobby, and John Samuelson, who were known collectively at camp as the Samuelsi. They were, in fact, the sons of the Nobel-Prize winning economist, Paul Samuelson, though we didn’t know that then. They were simply three charming small tow-headed boys who seemed more like mascots than campers.
One of the least-liked activities at the camp was that of raking eelgrass off the swimming beach. This meant wading into the slimy, itchy fronds of eelgrass while being attacked by biting greenhead flies. Needless to say, this activity was not voluntary, but was meted out as a “penance” for some small infraction, such as not showing up for morning assembly or talking after lights out. The Samuelsi triplets were not exempt from eelgrass duty, and I remember seeing them on the beach, trying to disentangle themselves from the spaghetti-like fronds of the marine grass.
Fast-forward now some fifty years. As I said, I was visiting some friends who had recently purchased a house in South Orleans with access to Pleasant Bay, a spot about a mile south of the long-vanished Viking sailing camp. We were standing around with some other neighbors, just about at sunset, experiencing the old amazement of that magical body of water, so seemingly unchanged over the decades. Then I noticed a figure on the beach about a hundred yards to the south. I could not see his features, since his silhouette was backlit by banks of pink-purple clouds, but there was something familiar, not about him, but about his posture. He was somewhat bent-over and had what looked like a clam-rake in his hands. On impulse I asked, “Who’s that?”
One of the neighbors replied, “Oh, that’s Paul Samuelson. He owns a house on the bluff there.”
My first reaction was, “Paul Samuelson. Can he still be alive?” Then I realized he meant not the father but the son, one of the Samuelson triplets I had in my cabin at the sailing camp so many years ago.
“He models financial investments, or something like that,” the neighbor said, “but he spends a lot of time down here on the beach,”
I looked again, and then experienced – well what can I call it: Déjà vu all over again? For there was little Paulie Samuelson, a half century later, still raking beach grass off the shoreline of Pleasant Bay.
