Four of us fill the spaces on two sofas in Fred's cozy living room. I have a 37-year friendship with Fred and a 20-year friendship with Lew who sits on the sofa beside Fred and opposite the sofa where I sit next to my new friend Terry.
Lew asks why the American people always have to fight to gain their civil rights. One of us mentions Dr. Martin Luther King's peaceful demonstration and his "I Have a Dream" speech. "I WAS THERE!" Lew shouts triumphantly above our voices. Suddenly we're listening to Lew. "There were mobs of people. It had rained, and the ground was soggy and muddy. They laid planks over the mud for people to stand on," Lew says.
Lew is himself an eyewitness to history. It makes me wonder: who else do I know who was somewhere witnessing a major event in history? I've known people who were at Woodstock. How did they get there? What were the circumstances of their lives that made them want to show up there? What are their memories of that event?
Recently I recorded a man's sad personal story of child sexual abuse at the hands of his Catholic choirmaster/organist who was the good friend of the famous Cardinal Spellman in New York City.
I've heard about tribes with a tradition of oral history. Designated historians in the tribes collected the stories and retold them to the people year after year. At this time in our culture, with technology changing so quickly, I believe the spoken word preserved in various mediums won't remain accessible.
Right now, I'm searching online for a company that has the technology to record to a CD my scratchy old 1970's reel-to-reel live performance recordings of my show band. I will have to pay at least $50 for this service. Even CDs are becoming outdated, as consumers download music to iPods.
Even while books are disappearing from consumer popularity, the written word will remain, not in our computers (I've lost my hard drives countless times over the years!), not online for Kindles and Nooks, but in books and notebooks, journals, diaries. It's still important to write down the events of our lives--sure, on a computer, if typing, or even speech recognition works best for you--but then print it out and save the writing. Make copies and send them to family members and friends (very important!). You're recording history and culture in a medium that won't be lost.
My definition of "a memory" is not the whole story. A story has a beginning, middle and end. A memory is a snippet. Back in Fred's living room, I'm seeing Lew from a different perspective. As long as I've known him, I haven't known he witnessed Dr. King's speech. I want to know more about what he saw and heard that day. How did he feel being there? What was his attitude? But the group's conversation has moved on to Ghandi.
Two days after that inspiring afternoon with my friends, I'm still thinking about Lew: he was there, watching and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King! How did he come to be there? I know he was living in the D.C. area at the time, in the military, working at the Pentagon. Was he there on an intelligence assignment? Was he there out of curiosity? Did he support Dr. King's views? Did he know the breadth and scope of Dr. King's vision at that time, or did he learn about it in the years that followed? Lew's memory of the day Dr. King spoke is not the full story. There's so much more I want to know.
Now in the 60th decade of my life, what would my stories be? Where was I when. . .? Where were you when. . .? Who wants to know? Who cares? I do!
4 comments:
From James Lee Burke's 2010 Dave Robicheaux novel The Glass Rainbow:
"I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be thought of as separate entities." (p. 216)
Could you write something more to help me understand this quote? I don't know exactly what is meant by "presence" in this context.
Burke has Robicheaux, the detective protagonist in his highly acclaimed series, see (or, at least, Robicheaux believes he sees) actual ghosts of people and events that have gone before. A Vietnam vet, Robicheaux still endures visitations from what he lived through there in nightmares in his sleep. But he also sees images of the past from the Louisiana of the Civil War, and these do not come in his sleep. On a deeper level, Roicheaux lives in a culture that even into the twenty-first century is inextricably woven with its past, good and bad. He wades through the mists of what has gone before as surely as he wades through the steamy air of the bayou country.
On its most universal level then, the sentence states what I believe to be the ultimate truth: Everything that is contains within it everything it ever was, people and places.
For me, the sentence has a slightly different meaning. In that spate of words I dashed out to post on your blog and then lost, I spoke of a phenomenon I have had to learn to live with after coming home from a forty-five year absence. It is not just that I remember people and places from the past. From time to time, I actually see them superimposed on each other. Let this example illustrate what I mean:
When my brother left the hospital and went to a nursing home here in town, I was in and out multiple times a day. Shortly after his arrival, I walked past a woman in a wheelchair, gray-haired, wrinkled, bent, wearing glasses, and seemingly unresponsive to what was going on around her. That is what I saw and what others saw as well. BUT I also saw a younger woman, dark-haired, vibrant, with a sweet smile playing across her face and eyes. After a while, I asked who she was and was told her name, which meant nothing to me. None I asked in those first two days could think of how I might have known her from the past. But I kept asking because I kept seeing both what others saw and what apparently I alone also saw, and it happened every time I looked at her. Finally, Mama Jean remembered she used to work the counter at the dry cleaners my parents used--and she HAD looked the way I was still seeing her.
I could give you other instances, most less dramatic, of the way the past and present co-exist for me, especially since I've come back. Some is as ordinary as visiting Mama Jean when she was recovered from shattering her kneecaps in a fall and suddenly seeing not the eighty-five-year-old great grandmother she is today but the vibrant Mama Jean I so treasured in my youth. The fist time I visited after the fall, she was lying supine in bed on her pillows watching a movie on TV, but when I came in, she rolled to her side to talk with me, and while we were talking, she threw her head back in the way she has, and that and those magnificent legs, now scarred and knotted, stretched out in a pose I saw so often after a swim at their lake house, and suddenly the present Mama Jean was both grey-haired and brunette, wrinkled and smooth-skinned. It's more than remembering--I ACTUALLY see both at the same time.
I fear I've not clarified what I mean when I see both simultaneously, but I do and both are equally present and equally vivid. --Nancy
Thank you for the explanation and examples! This is how I see everything, too! I can only hope my long-time friends remember me in the combination of present and past, of the best layering of what I have been and am today.
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