Tower to Trenches
I am writing this at 5:30 a.m. on a still, hot morning (also “still hot” as in “never cooled down). A fan churns in the background. I have been up since 3 a.m., wondering what heat record we will break today. Heat waves make the days memorable, if also miserable. We will remember this week of 100-degree weather.
The world has been in a spate of remembering in recent weeks. The 40th anniversary of the moon landing brought out the old grainy pictures of Neil Armstrong stepping down into the eternal footstep on the moon. Then Walter Cronkite died, bring a fresh round of remembering: JFK’s assassination, the moon landing (again), Vietnam. We all had our version of the “where I was when ____” story, told for all the great historical moments that were society’s version of the heat wave.
Side story: I was at the gym several weeks ago when news broke about Michael Jackson’s death. The staff person saw it on-line, and we turned on CNN to see what was the beginning of nonstop coverage. The staffer, a young woman perhaps in her 20s, said to me, “This is the kind of thing where you’ll always remember where you were when you heard. It’s like I’ll never forget where I was when…” [What was she was going to say?—she was too young for the moments that were my story—JFK, Martin Luther King, Kent State.]
She stated with feeling: “I’ll never forget where I was when Tupac died.”
I didn’t say what I thought, which was, “Tupac died?” Nor did I say, “Remind me who Tupac was.”
I thought this was an hilarious story. Tupac as emotional memory. Now, ironically, I will probably never forget where I was when Michael Jackson died.
But back to now. This past week has been one of a lot of remembering for me, thanks to Facebook. In my last entry I wrote about my ambivalence about joining Facebook and being part of the social media world (see Face Up to It) but since then my conversion has been complete. I was found (and “friended”) by a girl from my high school, a name just familiar enough for me to believe that she was right, that we had sat near each other in 10th grade French class. I thought this was remarkable in its own right, but within several days my In Box lit up with a host of Teaneck High graduates from the class of 1970, many new to Facebook. The message thread grew so big we became a group. People who knew other alumni not yet on Facebook started recruiting. The “Where is so-and-so?” messages yielded far better results than my efforts at Googling old friends.
The names popping up resonated in me. Even when I didn’t exactly remember the person, I remembered the name, and an old part of me, the part that hadn’t thought much about high school in a long time, woke up. I found my high school yearbook and had a fresh round of memory shock. People’s high school faces were frozen in my memory, but suddenly there they were writing messages on Facebook, older, with families, now lawyers and deans and business consultants and artists and teachers and people with a life story. The experience was visceral for me, the old wordless memories of high school awakened from a slumber, groggily trying to mesh with the reality of middle-aged faces before me. I felt excited at the evidence before me: this is memory, brought to life.
I sent a friend request to one person, someone who was part of a much higher-echelon social crowd in high school but a person I remembered well. She didn’t respond, and I had a brief moment in my gut of thinking: oh no, I’m still not cool enough. I wondered how my accomplishments stood up to others. I wondered what people remembered about me. (One girl said she remembered my long hair, and how I used to flip it over my shoulder. I remember the hair but not the flipping, and reading her description was like seeing old footage discovered in a now-obsolete camera.)
The names kept flowing, the connections growing, the memories billowing up for everyone. I left the growing cohort of high school friends and stepped back to junior high, and then stepped back to elementary school, and then to nursery school! And there I was, chatting away with someone I went to nursery school with. I was exchanging messages with someone I had known at a time when I didn’t know how to read or write.
Why does this excite me? What is it about connecting with people who are part of a long-ago past that makes me feel alive and more real? What is the purpose of this kind of remembering, this looking back through eyes that must refract 40 years? I had neither a perfect childhood nor a “greatest hits” memory of high school (I actually left high school early, chomping at the bit to get on with life). I know only that I want to remember myself, to know the pieces of my life, the themes; I want to study the questions I’ve lived and the answers that have found me at different ages. My family is gone now—parents, sister, grandparents—so I have been alone in remembering of late. But now, suddenly, I find a community of people who can join in the remembering, and I feel relieved, a load shared at last.
Noise and heat bring me back to the present. Workers are tearing down our old, rotting deck before constructing a new one. The banging and sawing noises interrupt memory for now. I can’t help but wonder what I want to tear down in myself as I sift through memory, and what I will construct in its place. The workers don’t care—they are too hot for metaphors!—but I will let that question simmer in the day’s rising heat. This entry ends here, but I am not done with remembering.
On Memory Awakened
