memory

First House

The last time L and I were in Rock Hill for a volleyball tournament, and Papa was still alive, I managed to find the first house I remember living in, the house Nana and Papa owned when they brought me home.

In the front was the same railroad-tie planter that Papa had built decades and decades ago, sometime in 1976 or 1977 I would imagine: I say this because I remember him building it, in vague, hazy memories that might be more the product of suggestion than actual memories.

Image from 1975

When Nana passed away and I was going through all the old photos we’d taken from their condo, I found one of us cousins in front of that house. I’m on the little horse toy toward the far right; that’s my cousin C behind me. This was from a family reunion that we had at our house. I remember a family reunion there, so it must have been a second one: I’m far too young in this picture to remember anything from that time.

From the same series of pictures is one of my grandparents: Papa’s father is on the far left; Papa’s mother is the only woman in the foreground.

And yet another one from that day, this time on someone’s motorcycle. I’m not sure whose, and I’m not sure it was the owner posing with me in this shot, and I’m not sure who the man in the picture is. These are all just things that exist in my past but not in my memory.

And the obvious move: what pictures will have this same effect on my own children? Probably none — their lives are so completely documented here that they would have no problem figuring out who was holding them on a motorcycle…

Lighthouse

In a scene in After Life,  Ricky Gervais’s character Tony Johnson is in the car as his brother-in-law drives, and he’s looking for music to play. He pulls out a CD, identifies the artist, and starts mocking his brother-in-law.

“Lighthouse Family?!?” he asks incredulously. He’s tempted to throw the disc out the window as he does several others.

Immediately I think, “I’ve listened to them. Or at least I’ve heard of them.” I hit “Pause” and sit staring at the screen. “Who was that group? How do I know them?” I wonder. I pull out my phone, load Spotify, search “Lighthouse Family,” play the first song that appeared, and in an instant, I know something is about to change.

When you’re close to tears remember
Someday it’ll all be over
One day we’re gonna get so high

The singer begins, accompanied by some light strings, a piano, and an organ.

“I’ve heard this, I think.”

The second line begins and the bass and drums enter:

Though it’s darker than December
What’s ahead is a different color
One day we’re gonna get so high.

“I’ve heard this! I know I’ve heard this — countless times, it seems.” But I can’t place it. Then the pre-chorus begins:

And at
The end of the day remember the days
When we were close to the edge
And wonder how we made it through the night
The end of the day remember the way
We stayed so close till the end
We’ll remember it was me and you

“This seems so very familiar!” But I still can’t place where I’d heard it. It feels like hearing a line from a film, knowing I’ve seen the film, but not even being able to remember the scene, the title, the actor. I familiar void.

When the chorus enters, though, I know. I remember where I’ve heard this song. I remember why I’ve heard it so many times.

‘Cause we are gonna be
Forever you and me
You will
Always keep me flying high
In the sky of love

“My God! It’s that song!”

In 1997, just a year after I’d moved to Poland, this song had just been about everywhere. On the radio. Playing in passing cars. At bars. At discos (i.e., Polish discos — dance places). Everywhere. And I always hated that song — so saccharine. Admittedly, the guy’s voice is gold, but the song itself? So empty. So vapid.

Yet I sit here listening to it, suddenly transported by a song I haven’t heard in over twenty years, a song I have thankfully and mercifully forgotten in probably just as long, and I feel such a longing to go back to that time for just one evening, just one beer, just one song. This song. It’s a song I hate and now, thanks to Ricky Gervais’s After Life, I love in that syrupy way that only nostalgia can inspire.

Time Machine

One of the things I like most about this site is the Time Machine widget at the bottom that serves up links every day from the past. What were we doing three years ago? Five? Ten?

But it’s the unpredictable things that bring long-forgotten memories that are the most enjoyable — like finding your fourteen-year-old daughter’s glasses that she wore when she was five.

Millennium Falcon

It was the greatest moment of my life to that point: a new, clean Millennium Falcon, nearly as big as I, was mine.

At times all I could do was sit and look at it incredulously.

Now, over forty years later, it’s in the Boy’s room, though the newness has worn off — both from the Falcon and for the Boy.

Old Friend

M and I were the most unlikely of friends. In many ways, we were as opposite as anyone could imagine. He was raised by his grandparents in the country, and throughout his schooling, I’m sure he was considered “at-risk.” He smoked (cigarettes and more), drank, and was, by his own admission, a hellion. When, at a church youth function, the minister gathered all the boys together and asked who’d brought the flask, it was M. If anyone ever got in trouble for making a smartass remark in youth group, it was always M. He was rebellious and sometimes disrespectful, and academic concerns were of little importance in his thinking. He finished high school, but just barely.

Yet on a church youth trip to Disneyworld, he and I ended up spending an afternoon together. We’d been in separate groups during the morning, but the kids in my group had wanted to break up into small groups. “Mr. K said not to do that,” I protested. But they did it anyway, and the result was the Mr. K, the minister, followed through with his threat: they had to spend the rest of the day with him and his group of adults. I protested my innocence, and the kids in my group admitted that I’d tried to keep the group together, so I was pardoned. M and I ended up spending the rest of the day together. It was the first time we’d really spent any time together, and from that afternoon, we became close friends.

While we had little in common, what we did have in common was enough, I guess. We both loved hot food, for example, and we’d often get the spiciest salsa we could find with a bag of chips to see if we could handle it, washing it all down with Mountain Dew. We loved music, and we spent a lot of time with his grandparents playing bluegrass, Paw (as I came to call his grandfather just as he did) and I on guitar, M on banjo, and Maw singing. We both enjoyed shooting .22s at anything that would sit still long enough, and though we shot at a lot of squirrels and birds, we never hit them. Old cans and cola bottles filled with water were our favored targets. How many times can you hit that two-liter bottle before all the water drains out? The strategy is, of course, simple: start aiming at the top and work your way down. During the summer, if we needed money, we’d spend an afternoon helping this neighbor or that put up hay, and we’d earn enough for dinner, gas, and a couple of movies.

When he graduated high school the year before me, my parents asked him about his plans. “I’ll just get a job in construction, I guess.” They encouraged him to at least take a few courses at the local community college. “Then, you could start your own construction firm and you’d have the paperwork skills to run it,” my mom explained. “Nah,” he laughed, “school’s not for me.”

One July day that summer, Paw gave us a job: “There’s some raccoons that are just giving our garden hell,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you boys’d take care of it.” We sat at the edge of a small clump of trees that summer evening, a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew sitting between us, .22s by our sides waiting. Soon enough, three raccoons trundled into the garden. We waited until the were situated so that we could shoot away from any houses then let loose.

Maw and Paw’s farm was in a valley that seemed to echo with the sounds of neighbors’ activities, and as we fired away, we heard their nearest neighbors, who were sitting on their front porch, cheer us on: “Somebody’s gettin’ some coons!” they whooped.

Afterward, we put them in a trash bag and Maw took a commemorative picture.

Eight years after his picture, I came home for the summer after spending two years in Poland and having already committed to a third year. I went to track down M, heading to his grandparents’ farm. I didn’t know if M was still living with them or if he’d moved out. In point of fact, he’d been moved out.

“He’s locked up in the Washington County jail,” his grandmother explained. “Breaking and entering.”

I went to visit him that same afternoon. After the deputy filled out all the paperwork, I waited in the visiting room. It wasn’t a room with a row of chairs and little telephones like you see in the movies. This was no prison, just a county facility: there was a chair on the other side of the bars and the rest of the office with a single chair next to the bars on the visitors’ side. Glancing around, I saw a sign that visitors were not allowed to bring anything to inmates. I looked down at the two packs of cigarettes I’d bought him, wondering what I’d do with them, when I heard the deputy call his name: “You’ve got a visitor.” M’s face was a mixture of pleased shock and utter embarrassment. We talked for a while — I’m not sure because we never really talked about anything important. I had friends that I could sit around and talk about the existence of gods, the current political situation, the ironies of life, but with M, it was seldom more than friendly banter.

As the visit ended, I turned to the deputy. “Here’s some cigarettes. I guess you can give them to any officers who smoke since I can’t give them to my friend.” The deputy smiled: “Go ahead. It’s no big deal.”

When I returned a year later, he was incarcerated again, this time in prison; I was in Boston, starting what I thought would be a long slog to a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion. We corresponded for about nine months, and then it just stopped just about the time I dropped out of grad school with the realization that while the philosophy of religion is an utterly fascinating topic, it has little practical value. I can’t remember who sent the last letter.

Shortly after K and I moved to America in 2005, I got word that M’s younger brother, who was in his mid-thirties like I was, had died from an aneurysm in his brain. Paw had died just a few years before that, and I hadn’t gone to the funeral because I was still living in Poland, but I was determined to go to C’s funeral.

The day before the funeral, though, a horrible storm swept through Ashville, covering the mountain I’d have to drive over with icy snow. K asked me not to take the chance; Nana begged me not to take the chance. I didn’t go.

A few years after that, Maw passed away. She’d moved in with her older daughter, and we’d moved to Greenville. For whatever reason, I didn’t go.

Some years ago, Nana got a contact number for M from his aunt, who was more like a sister — or was it the opposite, an sister so much older that she was more like an aunt? I can’t remember. I sent a text to that number, but I never got a response.

I find myself sometimes thinking about people from the past, wondering where they ended up. Social media has answered that question for so many of the people I grew up with. Others disappear. But it occurred to me that I might simply Google him.

I did, and I wish I didn’t: I find an article from the local paper where we grew up — “Bristol, Va. man arrested after agents find meth lab.” The link is to a Facebook post, so I click through, but the link to the article itself is broken. I go directly to the site and search. I find two hits.

“Please let this be a different man.”

It’s not.

A Bristol, Virginia man is charged after a tip given to police leads to the discovery of a methamphetamine lab.

Washington County, Virginia Sheriff Fred Newman said a search warrant was secured to examine a home located in the 22000 block of Benhams Road on Monday.

Deputies then arrested Michael Lee Braswell, 44, who is charged with possession with intent to manufacture 28 grams or more of methamphetamine, possess precursors to manufacture methamphetamine, allow a minor under the age of 15 to be present while manufacturing methamphetamine, and possession of meth.

Newman said Braswell is being held without bond in the Southwest Virginia Regional Jail in Abingdon. (Source 1 || Source 2)

The article is from Tuesday, September 20, 2016. I guess had I been in the area then, I could have visited him in the same jail in which I’d visited him almost twenty years earlier.

I head back to the Facebook source and read the comments:

A dear friend from my youth is being called a dopehead (I guess that’s true) and scum.

I guess I could have seen it coming when we were kids. I did see it coming. I was with him on two occasions when he bought pot. He didn’t admit. He didn’t show it to me. He certainly didn’t offer it to me, but there was no doubt. When you pull into a convenience store parking lot, and your friend gets out, goes over to another car, and sits in that car for a few minutes, coming back stuffing something in his pocket, it’s obvious. When you and your friend pull into a driveway, and a scruffy young man walks out to the car, makes small talk, then asks, “How much of that stuff did you want,” it’s obvious.

I clean up his photo in Lightroom to make him look a little less — what?

It doesn’t work. He still looks too much like a — what? A thug? An exhausted and frustrated man? I try again, trying to soften the hardness of his skin.

A little better, but there’s nothing I can do with those eyes, those forlorn eyes that seem completely lacking in surprise, completely resigned to his reality, completely fatalistic.

Every year, there’s a kid or two on the hall that I find myself wondering about, thinking that he or she might end up like this. There’s the same resignation about them, the same air of fatalism. Every year I try to help them, to show them that they do have some control over their fate, to show them that more is in their hands than they probably realize (though the cards are often stacked against them). To try to prevent them from being a photo someone looks at thirty years later, wonders whatever happens to them, then loads a search engine and beings looking…

The Solo

Looking through old images for pictures of Dad, I found this video and promptly uploaded it for posterity. This was Thanksgiving 2005, our last Thanksgiving in Nashville, where we used to go every two years to spend the holiday with Mom’s brother Nelson and his family.

I can’t remember why Dad was pantomiming singing, but it was like in connection to the years-long running joke about his lack of singing ability. He used to say that most people like it when he sings a tenor solo: “Ten or more miles away, and so low you can’t hear it” he’d add with a sly smile.

February Evening

I head out for a walk with the dog as I listen to one of Sam Harris’s latest editions of the Waking Up podcast in which he discusses the nature of time with physicist Frank Wilczek. We like to think of time as this little moving slice of now that’s passing through the past into the future, but it’s really not like that at all. Time in a sense is the measure of change, and basically clocks things that change predictably and regularly against which we mark the seeming passing of time. In that sense, then, everything that changes is a clock, Wilczek points out.

Everything is a clock. I stopped in mid-stride to think about that. It’s so profound and yet so simple at the same time, an observation that’s been staring us in the face all our lives but eluding us at the same time. Simple, elegant.

As I continue my walk, I pass a man standing in his garage talking on the phone. I raise my hand in greeting. It’s a Southern thing — we wave at everyone — but he doesn’t wave back. “Perhaps he didn’t see me,” I think. Then, noticing some of the flags hanging in his garage indicating a political persuasion diametrically opposed to mine, a little thought experiment begins in my head. “What if we could read each other’s minds? We’d know where the other stands on so many issues that we otherwise keep to ourselves. We’d really, truly know one another. Would we be less likely to wave at each other?” And that’s a terrifying thought.

About this time, I grow tired of the podcast and switch to a playlist I’ve created called “Nostalgia” — songs to induce just that. The first song up: “Private Universe” by Crowded House. What a strangely perfect song. It’s not at all about the private universe I’ve been contemplating, but what a coincidence. Private universes — the physicists’ idea of a multiverse is a reality, because we all live in our own private universe. It sounds lonely, but it’s much more comfortable for us to live in these little walled-off universes because they afford some privacy that a non-private, evening-walk-thought-experiment mind-reading universe would render impossible. Even if that means we never truly know one another, it’s better in our private universes. We’re passing our experiences and memories, emotions and impulses through our own filters as we share them with others who then pass them through their interpretive filters. There are so many layers separating us that it’s a miracle we can claim to know anyone at all.

But there’s a hint of tragedy in this, because even with those with whom we’d be most willing to share such a non-private universe, it’s impossible. I will never truly know my children because of all the things they don’t, won’t, or can’t share with me, and they will never really know me. In a sense, we live with strangers, each and every one of us. The only thing we truly have in common is the fate that awaits us all — when the clock that is our body wears down and stops recording time for us as conscious individuals and begins to be a measure of unconscious decay.

It’s about this time that the next song comes on: Billy Joel’s “Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel).” This song has always made me think of Natalia, a student I taught in Poland who died before her senior year in the summer of 1999. “That’s almost 22 years ago now,” I think. “Had she not died, she’d now be old enough to have children older than she was when she died.” The song winds down:

Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabies go on and on
They never die
That’s how you
And I will be

How did I never notice that nod to mortality at the end of the song? And how is it that a talk about physics can end with such nostalgia? I feel like I should have an answer, but I also feel like none is needed. I’ve done what I set out to do: record some thoughts I had one February evening as I walk our silly dog, and that’s really all this is for. Billy Joel writes his songs that will never die; I write a blog a decade after they ceased being hip.

1978

Day 68: Training Death and the Maiden for Exploring

Death and the Maiden

My friend M grew up on a farm with his grandparents. His father passed away; I never really knew what happened to his mother. But from the time I met M, he lived with Ma and Pa as he called them, and as I came to call them.

Their farm was just outside the city limits, a place in the county that felt so different and distant from my suburban, cookie-cutter neighborhood that I felt I might be in a different state. In a different country.

We spent a fair amount of our time there shooting .22s and shotguns. We’d shot at birds and usually miss. We’d shoot at squirrels with the .22s and miss; we’d shoot at them with the shotguns and, well, it wasn’t pretty. We were stupid — what can I say?

One Sunday afternoon in 1990, just before I started my senior year of high school, Pa gave us a task. “There are raccoons that are just givin’ the garden a hard time. How about sittin’ up on the hill above the garden and seein’ if you boys can take care of the problem?” He needed to say no more. We took a bottle of Mountain Dew, Pa’s double-barrel 16-gauge shotgun and Papa’s bolt action 20-gauge (a bolt-action shotgun? really?) and took positions on the slope just behind the garden.

About an hour before sundown, the raccoons made their way into the garden. We waited until they were among the cornstalks, reasoning that they would sustain the least damage from stray pellets, then fired away. Papa’s shotgun had a two-shell clip and held one in the barrel. I discharged those in short order then reloaded as quickly as I could. M fired one then the other barrel, broke the gun over his knee, tossed out the spent shells, and was firing again before I knew it. I think we reloaded twice. M might have reloaded thrice.

All told, we killed three raccoons that afternoon and earned the gratitude of both Ma and Pa. And we had a hell of a good time.

I’ve long ago lost touch with M. I last saw him in 1998 during the summer I came home after two years in Poland and one more year waiting. He’d made some bad decisions, and the place of our meeting was something out of an O. Henry short story. After that, we corresponded a few times, but the last we communicated was in late 1999.

That was almost thirty years ago now, and I still think back on that day fondly. Not because of the death we dealt but because of the innocent friendship lost. I don’t feel guilty for killing those ‘coons, though: they were doing real damage to the garden, and we took care of the problem in the country-folk way. Sure, we probably could have trapped them and released them somewhere else, but Pa was not a sentimental man, and he would have regarded that as a waste of time.

Years later, I thought of this day when I read the poem “The Early Purges” by Seamus Heaney:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Today, the Boy made his first kill. Birds were in our blueberry bushes, and the Boy had his bb gun. Somehow, he was close enough that one shot dropped a robin that was making an evening snack of our still-unripe berries.

The Girl was furious about it. She was literally in tears, shouting at him that he had no right to kill an innocent bird that had done nothing to us.

“In this time of the pandemic, we have to share,” she muttered as we ate dinner — fish our neighbor caught a couple of weeks ago when the governor let boat ramps open again before reclosing them due to a general failure to follow the newly-established guidelines.

I didn’t point out the obvious irony, nor did I point it out when she popped chicken nuggets into the toaster oven for her evening snack.

Training

The other day was Clover’s birthday. I think it was her birthday. L insists — positively and passionately insists — that it is the 21st of May. Or the 20th. Or maybe it was the 19th. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about her certainty. But we celebrated Clover’s third birthday this week nonetheless by getting her an agility course.

She’s already got a few new tricks up her, well, I guess tangled in the long hair on her hindquarters. (Cliches sometimes break down, I suppose.)

Exploring

E talked K into doing a little exploring after dinner. While K was still in her good clothes.

He was keen to show her how the plastic box his survival gear came in is, in fact, watertight.

Lost Stories

In 1986, I went to Austria with a group of about 120 teenagers from various congregations of our church. We didn’t go as part of a mission trip — our church members didn’t proselytize, for that was the responsibility of the leader through his television program. (Members’ job was to support him, i.e., pay for his TV time.)

The program was called the Winter Education Program, and it was intended to teach us kids who went about two things: winter sports (like the church’s SEP did for summer sports) and theology (which could more aptly be called programming since questioning was out of the question). It was, in reality, an extended ski trip for the kids whose parents could afford it.

I really remember very little about it other than two salient points: first, I never really connected with anyone there and didn’t develop any close friendships. When I went to the summer equivalent a few years later, I made great friends, some of whom I’m still in contact with. Second, I bought my first Pink Floyd cassette on this trip, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. My father, taking his duty to protect me very seriously, had to approve a given band before I could buy anything by them, and I had a suspicion that Pink Floyd wouldn’t make the cut. (There’s a double pun in there for anyone familiar with their discography.)

I hadn’t even thought of this whole adventure in probably 25 years when going through photos we took from Nana’s and Papa’s condo, I found these images. It’s a significant event (in a sense) of my youth, and it’s something my wife and children know nothing about. And that realization is what really got me thinking.

I’m forty-seven years old now. That’s roughly 17,155 days and change. By any conservative estimate, I’ve had thousands of little experiences that I remember to some degree or another, making them at least slightly significant, about which my family knows nothing about. They were insignificant at the time, but I remember them years later — that provides some degree of import, I think. There is, of course, no way or reason to share all these experiences with them, but that means much of my life is a mystery for them.

The same, though, is true for my own parents. I know only what they’ve told me, and now that Nana has passed, there are stories upon stories that I will never know.

20 Years Ago, Chinese New Year

Twenty years ago this month, I headed to Chinatown in Boston on a Saturday morning with several coworkers to video, photograph, and interview participants in the community’s Chinese New Year celebration.

We were all working for Digital Learning Group, shortened to DLG in conversation, which would soon be rebranded DLI (Digital Learning Interactive), a company making interactive textbooks for college courses. This was 2000 — pre-social media, pre-almost-everything-we-call-the-internet-today. There was really innovative thinking behind that company, but we all seemed to be figuring it out as we went along.

I volunteered to take photos, and I didn’t even have a digital camera at the time. I took my Nikon FG, my best lense, and a lot of optimistic hope on that photoshoot.

My job had nothing to do with technology at that time, though. A graduate student in philosophy of religion, I’d been hired as the editor for the intro to religious studies book that was just under development.

At the time, I was studying at Boston University and writing things like this in my journal:

I’ve been reading Durkheim for class next week and I have to admit that he’s a little frustrating. I sometimes feel as if he takes me on great, circular arguments that assume points vital to that which he is trying to prove. For example, he talks about the fact that society needs an ideal to create itself (Elementary Forms of Religious Life 422), yet he’s not quite clear whence comes this ideal. He seems to indicate that it comes from the sacred/profane distinction, hinting at some kind of epiphany the believer experiences during some religious ritual. Yet whence comes the sacred/profane distinction? As I understand Durkheim, this comes from society. Yet religion, he indicates, in a way gives birth to society (418). In fact, religion and society are all but indistinguishable, yet he uses one to discuss/prove the other, and then a few pages later, the other to prove the first. It’s incredibly annoying.

We honestly really didn’t know how we were going to use the material: we had authors creating content for the sections on Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but nothing for eastern religions.

The author for our Judaism section was Jacob Neusner, who sent in a 50+ page resume. At that time, he had 500 book publications to his name, and by the time he passed in 2016, had over 900 books published. How on earth did he do that? I wrote about it in my journal:

That seems completely impossible — five hundred books? I think he was born in the 30’s; finished his grad work in the 60’s. That gives him forty years of academic life. But let’s say he began writing as undergrad, when he was twenty. So that’s fifty years, which comes up to ten books a year, or a book every 36.5 days. That has got to be a slight misrepresentation; it has to include books he’s edited and such.

I can attest to the man’s speed: I was unable to keep up with editing his work while he wrote it. He sent in a new chapter every couple of days, and because I was working on a number of other projects, I was taking about a week per chapter.

I look back on that time, and I don’t recognize myself. I read my journal from that time — I was still writing daily — and I don’t see myself in my concerns. That’s always the case, I guess.

Still, I enjoyed working that job. I enjoyed being part of the .com explosion, of working on something that seemed so innovative.

Ultimately, though, I quit the job. Poland had sunk its hooks in me more deeply than I’d initially realized. I was getting letters from students (“Czy mogłabym pisac do Pana po polsku, bo wiem, że jak piszę po angielsku to robię dużo będów i Pan się może denerwuje czytając list z takimi bądami.”) and finding that I missed it all so terribly.

Plus, by then I’d moved to the tech side and was getting great money for essentially making a computer jump through hoops. I was learning much but accomplishing little, I felt.

Now, twenty years later, I’m back in America with a big slice of Poland here with me, teaching again, feeling like it was all so inevitable, this path I’ve taken.

Music

How did I come to love music so much? Nature or nurture? Well, I can’t say much about nature because I have no idea about the genetic magic that might lead to a love of music. I can say there was some nurture involved.

Christmas 2016: Nostalgia

I’m not quite sure where they got it — maybe we gave it to them, or perhaps they just bought it themselves. In a way it doesn’t matter. What matters is that when E found the little Leap Frog play house that was just like the one he played with as a little toddler (“Daddy, I’m not a toddler any more. I’m a little boy.”), he was utterly enchanted. He took the little house over to the small couch in the sitting area just off of the dining room in our friends’ house (they do Christmas; we do Easter; another family has taken Halloween, even though it’s not a traditional Polish holiday) and just played with it as if it were the greatest thing. I wondered for a moment if perhaps he was experiencing his first little bout of nostalgia.

I always wonder about that: what will set my kids off when they’re adults, what will send them back into the past with a certainty that times were somehow better then and a strange emptiness with the realization that those times will never return. Or maybe that’s just the stuff of romantics, and perhaps my kids won’t grow up to be nostalgic romantics.

But there are worse things than being nostalgic romantics. Nostalgic romantics get to sing Christmas carols with an abandon that others lack. The act is a time machine.

It’s what makes movies like White Christmas so charming almost seventy years later.

And that’s all I’ve got for this Christmas…

Over the Shoulder

It used to be something of an obsession. “What was I doing around this time X years ago?” I’d ask before opening up my journal for that month some years earlier and reading to see what happened. Yet what if I’d had a way to thumb through pictures the way I thumbed through my journal entries? For most of my life, I had about as much interest in photography as I had in basket weaving. Then I moved to Poland. And a couple of years after returning to the States, I moved back to Poland, then armed with a digital camera. And so I can open up a photo viewer and easily look over my shoulder.

September 2001: I’d just moved back, and I was still taking daily walks in the fields behind the house where I rented a room. Such pictures now seem almost unreal: did I really live there?

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September 2002: The fascination remained. I was still talking almost daily walks in the fields, heading up to a small patch of trees known to locals as “Cats’ Castle”, watching the sunset from various locations, impressed that the church was visible from almost every point in the central part of the village.

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And then an empty year. Did my computer crash? Did I not take many pictures? Whatever the cause, September 2003 is void of pictures.

September 2004: K and I had just gotten married. We’d brought all our lovely wedding gifts — the glass paintings and various prints — to my apartment which was then our apartment. We looked through pictures of our wedding and spent lovely afternoons creating photo albums.

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September 2005: Back to the States, to Asheville. “This is where I want to live,” K said the moment she saw the small town surrounded by mountains. It was understandable: it looked so much like her own home. And have a few lovely parks about didn’t hurt either.

Asheville Botanical Gardens II

September 2006: The Girl was just a few months away. We’d heard all the stories, but who can really prepare for how a child is going to change one’s life?

Morning Walk II

September 2007: The Girl was with us, and already showing her precocious nature. She sat only to roll; she crawled only to crash; she lived only to giggle and fuss.

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September 2008: L, able to walk, began asserting her independence. The innocence would surely linger?

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September 2009: Independence increased.

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September 2010: We learned quickly that owning a house is owning a project. A never-ending, always-bank-account-draining, eternally-exhausting project.

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September 2011: Where did that baby go? Certainly she’s somewhere around here?

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September 2012: If I could have glanced forward in time from 2001, surely a wife, two children, a house, and a cat on a tired Wednesday night would seem just as unrealistic as the fields of Lipnica Wielka seem to me now?

Afternoon Nap

Heading Home

I grew up in a border town — half in Virginia, half in Tennessee — about three hours north of where we presently live.

In the last fifteen years, I’ve only gone back a handful of times. Today, K and I are making the trip to meet with people I haven’t seen in twenty years, most of whom I knew only in passing, and many of whom I probably won’t recognize, and if I do, I likely won’t remember their names immediately. Yet there are a few, and to see them again will be worth it.

I wonder, in the age of social networking, will future generations have twenty-year reunions?

Open Sesame

I’d left it on the counter as I’d cooked dinner earlier tonight, and as I picked up the bottle of sesame oil, I suddenly fell back through the years and found myself standing in my kitchen in Lipnica Wielka in the late mid-90s, holding the bottle of sesame oil I’d inherited from Roy, an American returning to the States. Standing here in Greenville, I closed my eyes and for a few moments, I could almost feel myself back in that odd kitchen: the little refrigerator in the corner; the old wood-burning oven that I’d covered with a tablecloth and pressed into service as a dish-drying counter; the overhead light hanging from a wire, casting a harsh yet dim light throughout the room.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place. I’d been so happy when I realized, a few weeks after moving into the apartment, that everything in the kitchen finally had a home. It was another sign that the small village in southern Poland was becoming my home. The rice lived a shelf up from the herbs and seasonings, which also housed the sesame oil. Everything had its place, including me.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place and wandering into the living room, sitting down to look over lesson plans for the next day. My rock star status mitigated many of the challenges of being a new teacher. I had an advantage over every other teacher: I’d crossed an ocean and half a continent to teach the kids. I was from the land of 90120, Coca Cola, and highways. The honeymoon lasted longer than one might have expected: although I was soon just another teacher, I never became just another Polish teacher. “I learned how to be a different kind of teacher from you,” my Polish counterpart English teacher told me when I left. I enjoyed what I was doing; I was teaching by choice. The kids recognized that.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place and wandering around the apartment, feeling lonely. Despite the incredible friendships I developed in Poland, I often found myself alone, and that solitude sometimes bore down upon me.

I imagined myself putting a bottle of sesame oil in a box to give a Polish friend before I left in 1999, thinking I’d never return. A vegan in a land of meat and potatoes, she appreciated different cuisines and figured she could do something with the oil.

I imagined all these things tonight, and for a moment, a familiar nostalgia and longing slid up beside me, brushed me, and moved on. Such an experience ten years ago would have sent me into a depression that might have lasted the evening. It eventually sent me back to Lipnica. Tonight, it brought a smile and chuckle at the power of sesame oil.

Books in the Basement

petuniaIn the process of reorganizing the basement storage/work room, K and I have been tearing open boxes that have sat virtually untouched for years. Most of it consists of my own belongings, packed up while I lived in Poland in the late 1990s (eventually repacked into sturdy Rubber Maid storage bins). My parents moved, and instead of making the decisions for me, they left it to me, ten years later, to go through the stuff and toss out that which was once treasure but now trash. Granted, I could have done it earlier, but I lacked the serious motivation. Who wants to root around through old boxes of memories?

I had cracked the box that I knew contained my photographs. Eventually, when I moved back to Poland in the early 2000s and dumped on them all my earthly possessions collected in Boston and Polska, the box grew to contain pictures from close to thirty years of my life. It was a strong incentive, and I’d gone through that box several times.

The rest of the boxes remained packed, essentially for close to fifteen years. This was the week that I opened them.

The vast majority were books and toys from my own childhood that my mother had saved. Most of them were in remarkably good shape, especially the books. Not a spot of mold; not a hint of mildewy age.most-bradfield-lion

I found a Harriet the Spy tour location tour on Flickr while writing this — well worth the time of any fans.

And so I took some time to go through books from my childhood, most of which I hadn’t held in my hands for at least twenty-five years. A look at the title and I remember almost everything: plot, illustration style with specific illustrations, and even my favorite parts. Petunia, the Sweet Pickles series, Benjamin Dilley’s Lavender Lion, stacks of Tell-A-Tale books–and so many other books I didn’t even remember having until I pulled them from the box. Near the bottom, late-childhood favorites hid: Harriet the Spy, a book on real, scary sea monsters, a book on tornadoes.

There were few specific memories about the books. Instead, it was general feelings, peaceful feelings. Calm.

I pulled several out to give to L.

harrietHer collection grows, and her eyes always light up when she gets a new book.

She takes books everywhere: she wants them by her as she plays; she wants them in the car with her; she wants one when on the potty. All of these are negotiable. The non-negotiable is the bedtime book. Usually her pick. That night, though, I chose: Petunia.

“Poor Petunia. Poor animals.” L mutters sympathetically when the firecrackers go off, scattering and injuring the animals.

I’m doing more than passing down books; I’m sharing memories in the most direct way, by recreating them.

Ties

Growing up in a conservative church, I wore a tie every single weekend. (Every Saturday, in fact, not Sunday, but that’s an entirely different story.) And in my teens, in the late 80’s, it was critical that they not be just any ties. They had to be fashionable, which means today, they’re dated.

When we moved to Asheville years ago, I found all my ties among the clothes I’d packed away ages before. What a flood of memories those silly ties brought back.

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They were narrow, that was the most important thing. I would look through Dad’s ties, admitting that some of them had appealing designs, but they were wide enough to rival aircraft carriers.

While they had to be narrow, though, the pattern had to be fresh.

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And “fresh” is almost never “timeless.”

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My pièce de résistance, though, was my white leather tie. Probably not even two fingers wide, it was a classy statement all in itself.

After we found them and I took some pictures, we dumped them off at Goodwill. If there’s any justice in the fashion world (and there isn’t — only trends), they’re still sitting there.