Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

An attic is in many ways similar to the vast storage facilities that lie hidden beneath and above every museum you’ve ever visited. The exhibits you walk through are like the life you see being lived right in front of you. If you are an experienced museum goer the existence of that treasure trove of unseen artwork is something you know is there somewhere. For the archivist, all of that art is there for the asking.

A life remembered lives in the attic or the basement or the back of a closet in the remotest room in the house. Beth spent 3 long days and nights pulling together the totems of her parents lives from the nooks, crannies and crevasses of what is literally the Hurst family ancestral home. No fewer than 4 generations lived significant parts of their lives in what was once a tiny one-room schoolhouse surrounded by Amish and Mennonite farms. What an incredibly daunting task, that.

Hearing her tell of her task (we were “together” on speakerphone) was what it must have been like if you could have been an open ear at the excavation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Rome. The attic had an attic; each closet had a closet. Every step further into each space unearthed another layer of the family’s history. Here a deed to the original schoolhouse, there the wedding certificate for her great great grandparents. Was her Dad a good student? Well, he had a pretty solid 3rd grade judging by his report card.

And the pictures! Oh my, yes, there were pictures. Beth and her sisters fell straight down the Schaeffer family tree. Who knew how much they looked like their Mom when they were all younger women? I got to see pictures of the stunning beauty I fell in love with some 35 years ago, a literal restoration of the portrait in my mind’s eye of our days of courtship. Treasures unearthed in the attic.

Stories, journals, histories, legends…they all came out of the attic’s attic and emerged from the closet’s closets. Beth’s “legs” fairly buckled under the responsibility of curation. What to keep? What should go? They are the last of their line, these Hurst sisters. Whatever was consigned to go would be forever gone. There are no more attics; there will be nothing to curate. She felt the presence of not only her parents but of their parents, and theirs, and theirs as well.

Is this nothing more than a melancholy musing on memory and loss? Maybe. There was a lesson in there, though, one that Mrs. bingo and I stumbled upon as we “walked” through those archives together. It didn’t have to happen like that. As it turns out each attic corner, each tiny closet contained notes and stories that lead, like so many tiny treasure maps, to the next discovery. Why had my in-laws not taken us all in hand and walked us together along those pathways? For sure there were stories that should have been buried elsewhere, art not meant to be seen by generations hence (note to self: remember this lesson when it is time), but still, we thought of the joy we could have shared had we just known these treasures were there to share. That’s the lesson my friends, one that Beth would agree afterward was worth the lonely emotional lifting she did as she curated a life remembered, archived like so many art treasures in the attics and closets filled over generations and hidden from view.

Someone may be alive today who’s been filling those attics. Find them. There is joy in the attic. Like so much that is joyful, to share your discoveries with those who created them is just too wonderful to let it pass now that you know that you don’t have to. Ask your parents or grandparents to take a walk with you in the attic. Together.

My thoughts on the making of memories,first written 2 years ago, re-printed here in response to GoPro’s “discovery” that the selfie is harmful to your potentially most cherished memories to be.

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” Babe Ruth.

“Friendship is the vehicle that delivers innocent people from that space between the rock and the hard place.” D.E. White

Like the Babe I’ve taken my swings, often and hard, at the corrosive effects of communication technology on human communication. For every time I’ve hit it out of the park–face to face over a glass of wine with Beth, a close friend, or one of my kids–I’ve whiffed on one that was low and outside hurled by new tech. For instance, Snapchat came and went and got sold for a Bazillion $$ before I even really knew how to use it.

Now, I’m hardly a Luddite. I’m sitting at a kitchen table littered with droppings from Steve Jobs’ imagination, pecking away at one of them while another serenades me, yet one more beckons for a response. It’s all really pretty OK though, because there’s no one here, really physically here, who wants or needs to talk to me at the moment. Even Abby, the world’s most curious Border Collie, isn’t interested in chatting.

This is not a “be here/be now” lament about focusing on the real, live person who is physically with you rather than your phone and its irresistible access to someone who is somewhere else. Nope. I lost that battle as spectacularly as any swing and a miss by the Bambino, at least on a societal level. For sure, every now and again, I hit a bloop single and get one of my kids to put down their phone and “be there” for a whole meal, but no grand slam big picture win on that one. (As an aside, who wouldn’t love to see a Sesame Street re-do of “Put down the Duckie” substuting “iPhone” for Duckie? Google it.)

This is about the most recent tech attack on the human experience as we know it–the “Selfie”. It’s not real unless you took a picture of it. You weren’t there unless you have a picture of wherever there was, whatever what was. And the most damaging of all, it wasn’t significant enough, it wasn’t truly magnificent or epic, unless you shared it with at least the first 4 degrees of separation.

The camera on your phone is stealing your memories.

But how can that possibly be? How can memorializing the momentous make my memories disappear? There are two insidious effects of the nearly compulsory grab for the phone and the shutter. The first is the simply that you’ve stopped the moment in question, interrupted whatever is wonderful about that singular now. Everything stops for the camera. You’re frozen, right then, right there, in that exact click. Your flow is gone. What might have come next, following as naturally as your next breath, is forever lost as soon as the camera appears. The re-boot is as jarring as emerging from the breath hold of a frozen dive.

Memories, the good ones at least, are like poems. Returning to those memories over time is like re-reading a beloved verse. The basic facts, like the words in the poem, remain the same; it’s around the edges of the memory that we find the smiles. In poetry it’s the message between the lines. In music it’s the space between the notes. This is where the magic lives. We shrink these spaces in the memories that hurt but won’t fade, and we spend as much time as we can engulfed in the happiness that lives in the space around our best memories. The foundation for growth here in this space is being fully engaged in simply living in each “now” rather than engaging your cellphone camera and Instagram.

You can’t really take a picture of how you feel, and in the end isn’t that what makes the memory?

The White family is moving. Beth has declared that the “Netty Empsters” shall live in a one-level abode. Furthermore, she has decreed that said abode shall occupy ~50% of the land and air now taken up by the dwelling “White house” in which I’ve lived for 21 years. Let the purge begin!

The challenge is in part rather prosaic: what do I/we/you need? There’s really no doubt that there is plenty of extra around here. Plenty of stuff and clutter. Where, though, does one draw the line between necessary, desirable, and…I dunno…neither? Once the line is drawn where does one dispose of “neither”?

I’ve got two very real problems with this process, one understandable and one irrational and silly. The silly one: what if I pitch something, only to discover later that I wanted it? Or worse, NEEDED it? That really is just silly; anything I truly need will be obtainable in a pinch, and anything I think I want will likely be forgotten by my next meal. Yet however silly and however irrational, I still worry over that as I sift through stuff.

The understandable one is a little more poetic and has to do with the totems of my past, those little knickknacks that tease out an equally little smile each time I stumble across them. Even if “stumbling across them” only occurs during a purge. Pictures, yearbooks, trivial little souvenirs of trips and places mostly forgotten.

Only, not really.

It’s that tiny connection to an event or a place or a person, or all three, that I most fear losing. Is this irrational, too? Or worse, is this also silly? I don’t dwell in the past, mine or anyone’s really. I don’t really spend very much time there at all. Yet each of us has a little collection of memories–some real and some (like last week’s musings) just little lies that we choose to believe–that are bathed in a soft sunlight of something that could be called “happy”.

Perhaps it’s generational. Will my kids (and both of you other kids out there their age reading this) ever experience what my darling Beth and I did in our garage yesterday as time stood still, frozen again and again by a picture, a seashell, some trinket? I sure don’t know, but that doesn’t really help me as I sift through the delights and the detritus of a house filled with 21 years of Clan White, and the stored 32 years of memories that came before. The memories and their “triggers” rest in my hands at this moment, not among the electrons dancing across the internet to someday rest in a place that may never need purging.

The rational, actionable answer probably lies there: utilize the tech of the present to preserve the memories of the past. It’s different, though. It really is. Much like the difference between turning the pages of a real newspaper, one made of real paper, and swiping through the same sentences on the device of the moment. The words are the same and the information is transferred equally effectively, only not.

Physically clipping an article or a picture and then carefully husbanding that memory over time, physically, is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from clicking “save” to either Instapaper or Evernote. It takes so little effort to do that latter that there’s no commitment to the memory! I look at a photo on FB, often one of 100+ in an album, and it’s…different.

I think that’s it, really. Commitment. Each time I sift through “stuff”, be it photos or books or trinkets, I make a tiny little on-going commitment to a particular memory when that little trigger goes back in the box, and the box goes back in my house. I make a tiny little commitment to the people who were a part of that memory (usually without ever telling them), a commitment that I will continue to remember them, to remember when being with them made me happy.

Will it be the same for our SM-centric, cloud-connected younger generations? Will it be the same for me and for Mrs. bingo as we go forward, hopefully not done creating tiny memories that will one day elicit those same tiny smiles? Will something be there to prompt them or us to open those virtual boxes that store the trinkets, that store the memories?

I only know that today I am visited by memories, by the people who populate my past, as they compete for a place in my present, the survivors of this latest purge. The ones that still make me smile.

I had an apple for lunch today. A MacIntosh Apple. Remember them? Remember when “apple” was the SECOND word in a phrase, when it was a “something” apple, not an Apple “something”? All alone at home, save for the pet menagerie, I had a MacIntosh apple for lunch and I was transported back in time, born aloft on the wings of tiny memories.

We always talk about the big things when we talk about memories, don’t we? We just assume that the bigger the event the bigger the memory, and the bigger the memory the more it must resonate. Beth and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and this of course prompted us to reminisce about our wedding day. We had an absolutely spectacular wedding, one that our friends and family still talk about, still compare with other weddings. It’s funny, though, when I look back on that magnificent day all of the really big things that you’d think I would remember are really kind of running “fast forward” and filmed through a slightly out of focus lens. I remember them, I really do, the bigness is just kind of… big! What I DO remember though is every tiny detail about my first date with Beth. I burned the scallops! And yet many’s the night when I sit down to dine with my “netty empster” partner, just the two of us, and a tiny memory of that first date alights.

Tiny memories are different like that. Take that Apple I had for lunch. A McIntosh apple, the kind of apple that pretty much everyone I know thinks of when they think of an apple from childhood. I just started buying them again; I have no idea why. I don’t think I’ve bought any real Macintosh apples for some 15 years or so. Do you remember the apples of your childhood? I sure do. My mom wasn’t really a great cook, if you define greatness by complexity or the use of fresh ingredients plucked from some farm stand or specialty shop somewhere. My Mom was an expert at foods that created tiny memories, though.

We only ever had MacIntosh apples in the house. All by themselves they were something better than good. Every now and then there would be something a little bit special. Maybe Mom put the salt shaker out and we remembered to shake a little bit of Morton’s goodness on our Apple. Perhaps she whipped up a little bit of cinnamon sugar to sprinkle on the apples. This was usually REALLY special because cinnamon sugar apples were almost always sliced in a bowl! When she made apple crisp… even without ice cream apple crisp was an event.

I find that tiny memories can be triggered by equally tiny things, and those tiny memories always seemed to transport me back in time to to a warm and happy place. It’s not always a trip to childhood, although the first stop on the trip may indeed a be a place I knew as a child. It’s not that these places or that these memories evoke a better time or anything like that. I’m truly convinced that the best day of my life so far was today. No, it’s something else, something a little less and something a little more. The best of the tiny memories seem to be crystal clear in their details, kinda viewed in HD.  Tiny portraits or little scenes whose details are surrounded and framed by happiness. Perhaps even by love.

Do you have these? These tiny memories that flit and fly across your consciousness like so many tiny sprites, floating aloft on wings so delicate they can’t be seen? No matter how hard your life might have been, I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have at least of few of these tiny memories. I can’t land at O’Hare or Midway without at least a little smile. Going to Chicago! That’s what I chanted when I traveled through the kitchen in the turkey basting pot. Who knows why Chicago. Every successful landing in Chicago comes with one of my tiny memories.

I wonder, as I get older, what will become of my tiny memories. Will they be the ones that will remain? Will they be the ones I’ll hang onto, call upon, resurrect as I plow on? I sure hope so. I sure hope that the first barefoot step on a beach, new or old, will still make me hear the screen door slam at the beach house in Manasquan. I hope I have to climb over someone on my way to the “way back” of some great big SUV, so that I can remember the epic climb over my brother and sisters to the back of that Chevy wagon my Mom drove. I hope I’m standing on the tee at some golf course watching some guy wiggle and waggle and generally make a fool of himself as he gyrates through his pre–shot routine, and I hope a tiny memory of my Dad barking at me or my brother floats in for a landing. “Quit farting around!”

Dad said FART!

Yup, I was home today for lunch, just me, the dogs, and Thug, the world’s biggest rabbit. I had a MacIntosh apple for lunch. Not sure which was sweeter, that wonderful, nearly perfect apple, or that tiny memory of a time long ago, the details in HD, so vivid. The details–the memories–surrounded by love.

I smiled. Someone had left the salt out.