During my junior year in high school I owned what would now be considered a vintage lighter, the kind that featured a striking wheel, a wick, and a wind hood and that required periodically soaking cotton packing with lighter fluid and replacing the flint. The name “Storm King” was etched on its brass casing. That lighter lit many a cigarette when I hung out with my best friends Jim and Mark at Barney’s DX station, back when cigarette smoking was still considered cool and the Surgeon General’s warning a mere surmise. It also illuminated late-night keyholes, discovered keys or coins dropped on darkened car floors, and fired up the charcoal at grill-outs. An all-purpose tool, indeed, and I seldom left home without it.
In my late adolescent desire to appear the embodiment of sophistication, I perfected a technique of snapping the Storm King open by squeezing it between my thumb and index and middle fingers. Despite diligent practice, however, I was unable to combine that dexterous move with hitting the striking wheel to cause an igniting spark—a feat that would no doubt have had the editors of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not hustling to my door. During the summer between my junior and senior years I somehow lost the Storm King and, strangely, through the time from then to now, have sometimes recalled it and wished I still possessed it. Undoubtedly, I could find a Storm King somewhere online. But I’ve never really looked. I wouldn’t buy it. I want the one I had back then.
* * *
In the winter of 1979, while visiting my folks over the Christmas holidays, I announced that, after eight years of small-town Wisconsin high-school teaching, I had resigned, effective at year’s end, to enter the Ph. D. program at the University of Minnesota. The graduate coursework I had done during the previous summers to move up and across the pay scale had awaked in me an eager desire to know more, to know better. I wanted to become a college professor. The University of Minnesota had not only accepted me, but also offered a teaching associate position.
Dad was pleased. He understood the urgent tug of aspiration and the seizing need for intellectual plenitude and self-betterment. His life embodied it. Mom, too, but she worried about my leaving a secure job in the present for an uncertain job in the future. It was not an idle worry. The graduate school application materials I had received included a cautionary statement describing the precarious market for tenure-line positions in higher education. I was effectually readying myself on a high board for a half gainer into the unpredictable. Still, like Dad, she supported my decision.
A week later I received a small package in the mail from Mom and Dad. It contained a small, hand-carved, wooden figurine of Don Quixote, mounted on Rocinante, shield in one hand, lance in the other. A note was included: “We know that for you, no dream is impossible—except for that one about playing middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Beneath my words, they had heard, as they always did, my own anxiety about the wisdom of my action.
That figurine occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf for many years until, somehow, amid the confusion of a move, it inexplicably disappeared. I have, ever since, mourned its loss.
* * *
A cigarette lighter; a figurine. Two small objects whose loss I lament. Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “One Art,” that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” but I do not find the implied indifference to be the case Perhaps I am afflicted by a Freudian melancholy, induced by an attempt to reclaim the libidinal investment of a lost object. Could that be why the songs of that troubadour of nostalgia and loss, John Mellencamp, dominate my iPod’s playlist? “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can,” he sings in “Jack and Diane,” because “Change come around real soon/Make us women and men.” And yet, I do not believe that we lose sixteen in the process of becoming adults. We carry it with us, as we carry all pieces of ourselves, into the present, if not as parts of who we currently are, then as points from which the who we are evolved. We gestate long in the womb of experience. Amid the jostling push and pull of the events that mark our lives, we carry those pieces forward to retrieve and stabilize ourselves, to calm the often turbulent churn that threatens to rend our I’s from our Me’s. We poach in the preserve of memory and carry our trophies forward to selve ourselves, to stitch a coherent sense of who it is that we have become.
Some say the past is inaccessible, a country whose borders, once crossed, permit no reentry. I think the readmission policy is considerably less implacable. Perhaps Walt Whitman says it best: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not.” We enter the past often to repopulate and recontextualize ourselves. Indeed, I sometimes find the same memory requires several visits: they are too ponderous for just one, too rich in their thereness; too complex, too densely layered to be taken in whole at once; too value-tinseled to be cursorily released in deference to an impetuous present; too filled with micro-revelations and small but fully visceral epiphanies.
Nor is the past a silent country. It calls. It hails. It speaks, continually, sometimes with the buttery drawl of pride or the trilled dialect of joy, sometimes with the moonlight inflection of nostalgia, sometimes with the clipped accent of regret, sometimes with a blowtorching howl. Always it speaks, a persistent soundtrack, and always we hear it, even if we are not listening.
A cigarette lighter and a wooden figurine. Two artefacts, cupped in remembrance, unduplicatable, absent but ever-present, objects that mean, still, and whose value lies in that recession-proof market of people and places and events connected to them, and to me.
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Past Is Not Past
With some frequency lately, shards of bygone times and elsewhere places, unbidden and unannounced, have arrived at my mental doorway, edged their way into the foyer, and then, with a cheek kiss and shoulder clap, stride boldly into the living room. They map the coordinates, the longitude and latitude, of a once world through which I passed and in which I left traces, ghostly connections, specters of before, that have now been aroused from their slumber to echo forth from the well of time. I have been beset by nostalgia, that peculiar archeology which reveals the truth of William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
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