My life has gone by so fast, with such a forward look, that I seem to be especially impacted by real nostalgia. Not the products of my youth, or the names or faces, but by the occasional Proustian flashback.
I was driving to work about two hours ago when I heard “Save a Prayer” by Duran Duran. I didn’t catch the whole song, but the melancholy refrain was enough to hook me. I’ve always claimed that pop music of the eighties had just enough reverb to evoke the emotional quality of an important memory; a tender memory. Especially the Cure. Anyway, I digress.
So immediately this song reminds me of childhood. Summer Saturdays would involve lot’s of families coming and going through the neighbordhood, kids playing, and me going through any one of my explorations. This reminded me of lying in the grass, the dead grass with my face centimeters from the dry dirt. I’m sure my sister must have been playing the radio, or a tape, outside in the front yard, or on the porch. I’m sure I would have been sweating in the oppressive heat. I’m sure I would have been looking for the tiniest moving thing I could find. Watching ants, aphids, or those little tiny red dots that would crawl around the concrete and stone that made up the outside of our house.
I nearly cried in my car remembering how open my life was then. How all I had to do was look around and discover things all the time. How people were there to answer my questions, and to direct me towards new explorations. I had so much to understand and learn and the goals and experiences were warm and simple, and direct and unchallenged by conflicting perspectives. Life was apprehensible and monocular.
Then suddenly, in the midst of my memory, my longing was challenged. I know that I don’t remember my childhood very well. I can’t remember events or their order, but in the last couple years I’ve come to be able to remember these sensual experiences, or at least create them in my mind. There must be some memory there right? I mean could I simply be fabricating not only these images, but then setting them solidly with emotions that I didn’t have then either?
I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to remember my emotional state at the time. There are so many contradictions and uncertainties in these experiences. I know now that memory can quite easily be forged and faked, by the brain in itself as a way of keeping the peace. The mind always wants to return to some sort of equilibrium, or to protect it’s world view, and I know that I ‘ve said, of my past, that it was lonely, that it was uncomfortably slow, and that I was more often than not uncomfortable in my shoes. But maybe those were the social moments? In all likelihood I’ve spread a general discontent with my upbringing, unfairly across the whole first book of my life.
At this point I don’t know for certain anything emotional, or personally lovely about my childhood, nor am I certain at all what those early years WERE like. I can suppose and impose what they were likely about, or describe them in the abstract by process of elimination, but these warm lovely innocent memories seem to defy my current worldview.
I don’t often see other people in these memories. I don’t see up close faces, or here voices. It’s all taken in during times by myself. My private reveries in the open warm sky, with my feet churning up caramelesque mud in the creek as I search with my toes for rock edges. Or getting a good grip on a tobacco stick before thrashing the hell out of some innocent milkweed stalk. I just don’t remember other people as sensually as I remember these private times. Seems obvious when you think about it. What’s not obvious is that my mind spun UP to these lone explorations and down during social interactions.
As I’m riding in my car I’m melting, thinking what have I done with myself? How the hell did I get here, and what can I do to not waste another summer inside. I’ll tell you what it won’t be. It won’t be taking an SUV up to the McDickle Peak to spend the weekend campin’ with my bros, or that nice young hip couple the Schmuckles. No thanks.Most painful to this whole experience, is that I don’t know how I got where I am, and if it is fair, or good to reconstruct my life, or my memories with this golden hue. ALL of my life. ALL of the good and bad are up for reconstruction, and I believe that I must try to paint love into that memory because I’m pretty sure I can’t MAKE that happen in my present life, with the readiness I can during those memories.
“Save a prayer till the morning after”