Still Amazed

My Kensington Classmates: A Field Trip Into Memory's Realm

 At some point in the late 1950s (or maybe it was the beginning of the 60s) I went to the birthday party of a classmate named Janet Fechner who lived on McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn, not far from my grandfather’s pizzeria. Janet was visually memorable for her long blonde hair, which she wore pulled tightly back from her forehead and plaited into a single and substantial braid; it was thick and heavy, a braid with heft. At the party, I met Janet’s grandmother, who seemed an aged and shrunken replica of Janet herself, right down to the braid, now silver-gray. In my memory, we are standing outdoors by a sunlit walkway, and I am talking to the grandmother, who is originally from Norway, and she is telling me that as a young girl she used to waltz among the fjords, and I picture her in a white summer dress, dancing, and all around her is Norway, a mythical blue-green land that I decide then and there I will one day visit.

This may or may not have happened. That’s the problem with memory, especially in a case such as this, where a time lapse of fifty years allows for a great deal of metamorphosis and invention, and a child’s original perspective, still dewy and dream-like, is suspect from the start.  Then again, that very perspective is what shapes the child’s experience of the world, and that experience is the child’s reality. Naturally, countless new layers of interpretation, alteration, and forgetting over the course of time cumulatively distort or bury the experience and its facts, and what we are left with is a sundry collection of stories, fragments, and impressions. My head is teeming with these, and whether or not they actually happened, they have become my truth.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately because, oddly enough, the advent of Facebook has suddenly deposited a handful of people onto my computer screen who were present in the long ago time and place of my childhood. These people are not family members, and thus are not tangled up in that peculiar and particular universe.  They are former classmates -- some of whom actually knew Janet-with-the-yellow-braid -- from P.S. 179, which by the way was also called the Kensington School, an inadvertently Peter Pan-ish name. 

It’s quite interesting to be in contact with folks who can recall tangible things I thought I alone remembered or validate details that had begun to seem dubious, including my own existence in this context. Like characters in some murky version of Rashomon, they bring observations I somehow missed, and viewpoints different from my own, and collectively we can, if not quite reconstruct a history (and what would be the point?), at least browse through it, and it’s fascinating to do so.  Our generation did not have adults with video cameras documenting every element of our lives; even photographs from ordinary days are scarce enough to elicit the surprise of recognition and a certain sense of wonder that some random moment was preserved. We peer into these pictures when they are posted, looking for clues to who we were and the textures of our lives, noticing the façade of a once-familiar building, cardboard cut-outs of autumn leaves on classroom walls, cursive script on a chalkboard, the expressions on the faces of motley children now scraping sixty, some of whose names we can still summon up. 

Teachers were strict in those days, and I was shy anyway, so I didn’t often compare notes with others about the whole weird epic of grammar school while it was happening to us. We sat in rows of wooden desks that still had inkwells, dressed up for Friday assemblies in boy and girl versions of white shirts and little red ties, were labeled early and conspicuously as smart or dumb, good or trouble. Steve, one of my newfound cohorts from Mrs. Olinger’s fourth grade class, remembers wearing a bright yellow badge in sixth grade that proclaimed him a monitor. “I served my school during lunch as the monitor of the north gate facing East 3^rd Street,” he wrote. “Ah, the great feeling of power, bullying the younger kids and being closest to the ice cream truck! As the year ended, I got busted for selling firecrackers and was demoted. So much for the entrepreneurial spirit.”

As for me, I never attained such heights of authority or nerve.  Mostly I kept my head down and tried to please, although I did once get into an all-out fist fight in the schoolyard with another girl (whose name I dare not mention, now that I realize so many of these people are real and still out there). I remember a frenzy of scratching, punching, pinching, and notebook throwing, with both of us down on the ground while a circle of kids excitedly gathered around us, and I guess I won, because the girl picked up her books and ran away. Then a boy named Michael, who had never before noticed me at all, came up and said, “Hurray to the victor!”  I felt sick.

 Fran, who was also in Mrs. Olinger’s fourth grade class and now lives in Calabasas, recently went back to the old neighborhood, Brooklyn’s zip code 11218, and posted new pictures of the school and other landmarks. “What a flashback!” wrote Carol of the brooding old brick building. “I could close my eyes and envision it. I passed it a million times. I lived right down the block.” 

A photograph of the basement area that was used for indoor recess and hot lunch yielded a flurry of recollections about the smells of tomato soup and rain and radiator steam, about the games we played on that green tiled floor, and getting in line to trudge up the stairs to our classrooms. We remembered Hurricane Donna, and crouching under our desks in anticipation of nuclear attacks, and Mitchell-who-died, (though as Fran pointed out, there was not a counselor in sight to help us through our various traumas), and a space shuttle launch viewed on a tiny black and white television screen set up on the stage in the auditorium. Mostly, we remembered Brooklyn as it was, and we remembered with fondness: candy stores, pickles in barrels, subway rides, lives lived in apartments on Ocean Parkway or Coney Island Avenue.

“A blast from the past,” said Barry, yet another of my classmates, in an email, “...or is it just a long dream that never ends?” It does feel like a dream, and that's what makes it so startling: one doesn't expect to run across people who dreamed the same strange dream or were right there with you in yours. It injects a bit of otherness into what has been for so long a personal and individualized possession. And although I barely knew most of these folks even in the old days and have very little concept of who they are today, it seems to me we went through something big and formative together, and are thus forever linked, and I feel a certain kinship with them.

There was even some talk among us about finding Janet Fechner, although we didn’t think she was the type to be on Facebook. But what if we did? And what if I then learned that I had never been to any birthday party at her house? What if it turned out that her grandmother had died long before Janet was born and wasn’t Norwegian at all?  Would I have to revise the little vignette I have owned for all these years? 

Never.

It brings to mind the work of Patricia Hampl, who has written extensively on memoir. “Memory,” she says, “is not a warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures.” She goes on to explain that writing out the narrative of memory is very different from transcription because so much invention inevitably occurs. Moreover, we may set out to write down what we think we know, but it is through the process of writing that we discover what we know. Intentionality, she reminds us, does not run the show; intuition does, and heart. 

Something Janet’s grandmother told me at that long ago party, whatever the words she used, gave to me the fjords of Norway, a waltz in a white dress, and some implicit sense that everything was both poignant and possible. It's a private space in the co-op dream, and it's unconfirmed, but I've kept it all this time, and regardless of the facts, it still rings true.  

 

 

 

Just Rambling (I Know, It's the Worst Title Ever)

I started this blog just a little more than one year ago, with the intention of its being first and foremost a documentation of reasons to be hopeful, but it evolved into a potpourri of memoir, reflections, and random ramblings, hopefully not too self-indulgent. And I’m not even sure what compels me to keep it going, but I tell myself that blogging is a discipline, an impetus to write, a self-imposed requirement to now and then produce some kind of ‘piece’, although there’s certainly a lot of leeway in that. Maybe more important, I actually enjoy doing it, and once in awhile my words connect to other souls out there, and I like that best of all.

Today, though, my thoughts can’t seem to progress beyond the sofa. It’s hot, and I have an overwhelming desire to lean back and close my eyes. So I won’t take on anything substantial. Maybe I’ll just list a few cool things from the course of the week, and I’ll catch a snooze now and then as I write. Okay with you?

YELLOW HILLS

Yes, I understand that the mustard is an invasive, non-native weed. In fact, I recently read a quote by one native plant expert admonishing us that mustard should be ‘destroyed, not enjoyed!’ Not only is it a fire risk, mustard also crowds out native plants and ruins habitat and food sources for wild animals. But at this time of year, it literally carpets the California hills in glorious yellow blossoms, and it is impossible not to sneak a bit of pleasure from the sight.

It’s called black mustard, and its fancy name is brassica nigra and according to legend its seed was scattered by the Spanish padres to mark the road from mission to mission. (The padres also brought disease and enslavement to the native people -- yeah, a peculiar kind of love -- but let’s not dwell on that, since history and current events are strewn with the victims of righteous believers who know only that their way must prevail. Okay. Enough. Sorry.) Anyway, coastal breezes and cattle further spread the seeds, and eventually that ‘ribbon of gold’ became a sea of it.

Around here at this time of year, the mustard is absolutely dazzling and impossible to ignore. There is a kind of psychedelic brightness to it as it shimmers wave-like in the wind, or in its stillness, washed in shifting light. On blue sky days the scene is shocking in its brightness, but even when muted by morning or cast in the silver gray of an ambivalent sky, the yellow hill season is strangely and surrealistically beautiful. (No wonder I can’t get any work done.)

Yikes. I didn’t know I would write so much about the mustard. Let us move on.

THE CENTURY PLANT IN BLOOM

I think its botanical name is agave parryi, and Nancy planted it about thirty years ago on the hillside behind her house. A huge spiky looking mass, it has minded its own business ever since, surprising no one. Now a tall spike has suddenly shot upward, thickening like a giant stalk of asparagus, curving over a bit like a cane. It is about six feet high at this point and beginning to change color and emanate blossoms, and it isn’t done yet, but it’s happening quickly. This picture shows what it looks like at the moment, but I’ll get a photograph at its culmination. I feel oddly honored to bear witness.

AND IT’S NOT ALL BOTANICAL

Other kinds of coolness unfolded in my universe this week, including social contact via the wonders of technology.

For example, Ming sent me one of her updates from Mongolia. Now there’s a girl who can write. Her emails are rich and dense with musings, just the way I like them. When you get an email from Ming, you first get up and make some tea, enjoying the anticipation of reading, and then you sit down with your tea and your computer and you savor it.

And Mr. Harbor called from England! How wonderful is it to be able to have a conversation with a gentleman from across the Atlantic Ocean and a generation? Pretty wonderful indeed. He had been listening to Glen Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. It took him back sixty years, he said. Hard times, six years of war, but there was refuge in that music.

Speaking of music, Marc sent me an mp3 file of Nina Simone singing ‘Strange Fruit’. Aside from the fact that I am always thrilled when Marc sends me music (or even spam for that matter…I just like hearing from him) this song is unbelievably powerful and haunting, even more so than the Billie Holliday version. It evokes the profound sorrow and pain that is part of our nation’s history, the shameful inconsistency that was woven right into the foundation.

And also about music, I’ve been listening to Andrew Bird. Good stuff. I especially like a song called 'Sovay', and another called 'Scythian Empires'. His lyrics are brilliant too: poetic and literate, if a bit enigmatic at times. So that's the soundtrack this week.

Back to technological communication: Jill (who happens to be Mr. Harbor's daughter) and I enjoyed a real-time frenzied-typing-chat yesterday. That probably seems mundane to the younger folks, but I'll never cease to be amazed. It's like passing notes in study hall but with no fear of being caught, and our desks just happen to be separated by an ocean and a continent.

Oh, and I acquired several new Facebook friends. I decided not to fear rejection and I went ahead and invited their friendship, which I now understand does not imply friendship at all but at least opens a door if you care to check in on them fondly now and then and also beefs up your numbers so you don't look like the weird unpopular middle aged lurker that others may suspect you of being.

To be honest, I still can’t take Facebook seriously, but it’s a curious phenomenon and I figure it might be a fun way to keep vague track of former students as they head off to college and beyond. True, it sometimes it uncovers a bit of sleaze and silliness that I'd rather not be privy to, but I don't pay that much attention. I guess I still don't know what Facebook really means. I'm starting to think a lot of it is just kids trying on images, but I'm kind of interested in its bigger sociological ramifications, although I am not among the alarmists who think it is somehow destroying authentic interaction.

When I was a teenager, I was always being yelled at to get off the damned phone. Wires constrained the radius of our wanderings in those days, so we had a long coiled extension cord that I would stretch all the way from the kitchen to the bottom of the cellar stairs. I would sit there talking for hours, and I seriously doubt that any of those conversations had great substance or significance. (In ninth grade a boy named Joe actually read to me from the telephone directory when he ran out of things to say: "Here's a guy whose first name is Dairy. Oh. His last name is Queen.")

Maybe it's always been more about connection than content. (And I hope I'm not doing that to you now.)

Major digression, that one. I could probably write a whole post on the subject.

Just a few more cool things before I go.

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

I tried those 'Ultimate Vanilla Wafers' from Trader Joe's. The description on the container says it all: a butter cookie with flecks of Madagascar vanilla beans. I have singlehandedly consumed almost the entire tub in three days. I guess that means I like them, but I won't buy them anymore unless Monte will help me eat them.

A new cheese store opened in Santa Barbara and I bought a cheese from the Netherlands called Leerdammer. Sweet, mild, nutty -- an amateur cheese-lover's cheese, no doubt, nothing stinky or controversial about it, but oh, it was good.

Finally, let us sing of oranges straight from the tree. This is how I know I am rich. I go outside, drink in the fragrance, gather a couple -- often right from the ground -- and eat them for breakfast.

AND A DOG

This is old Terra, a little red (now mostly white) heeler. You wouldn't know it to look at her now, but Terra was quite an athlete in her day. She used to run with us when we rode our bikes, chase cattle (bad dog, but it's instinct) and leap tall buildings in a single bound. (The last one is a lie, but she did have a lot of boing in her jump.) Terra has fallen from a cliff, been run over by a car, and is probably about 90 in human years. So she's understandably slow, deaf, arthritic, and a little out of it at times. On the other hand, she is still a velcro dog, sticking to us with a determination that is both touching and annoying. She follows us from room to room and feels terribly heartbroken and abandoned if we go someplace and do not take her with us, barking with indignation as we make our getaway. (I've tried to explain to her that it isn't always possible or practical to take her along, but she doesn't get that.) I even used to take her to school with me, but at some point it was against the rules to bring a dog to school, even if it did make the children laugh and play, or maybe that's why. Anyway, what I wanted to mention is that every once in a while, Terra completely forgets that she's old, and she breaks into sudden playfulness, all frisky and rambunctious. She does her cute pose with the paws outstretched and the rear up, then circles around and invites you to be young with her again, at least for a moment or two. She did it yesterday, in fact. And it worked.

On the Shore of Twenty-Something

The sweetest gift of having been a teacher for many years is the grown-up students who linger in your life. Maybe you’ll be entering the supermarket, and a strapping young man will call out to you, and you’ll look at his vaguely familiar face and recall the sixth grade boy he once was, as happened to me the other day. On this occasion it was Bernardo, a bright, good-natured fellow who is now taking courses at City College. Friendly and respectful, he made me feel as though I had been someone important in his life, and it cheered me for the rest of the day.

My heart spills over with a rambunctious roster of kids who passed through my classroom on their way to the world, and it’s a treat to glimpse them as adults. Most of my teaching experience was in two small rural schools, each set in a community whose children feel connected to it, and although they often venture to places faraway, they almost always find their way back, at least for a visit. As a result, the delight of running into former students is not a rarity at all.

Once in a while, however, the teacher-student relationship actually evolves into a friendship. In the picture, for example, are two of the all-time greatest -- Parker and Ming -- and to the extent I am a current presence in their lives, I feel nothing short of honored. Ming in particular has glimpsed plenty of my folly and vulnerability, and if I get too hung up on the fact that not so very long ago I was the teacher and she the little girl, she says, “Cynthia...you’ve got to put it in perspective. That was at least twelve years ago. Twelve years for me is literally half of my life! It’s just not that recent anymore.” With these words, she frees me to be myself and to discover the dimensions of an inter-generational friendship with someone other than my own abundantly loved daughter, with whom there is always that mother-daughter dynamic.

A gifted writer, Ming helped me to sort through pages of my own work to select a submission for a scholarship application to a writing program this fall. Her advice was sound and candid, and in this instance she was the teacher indeed to the student that is me. (She also reminds me bluntly and often to love myself a little more. Why is that so hard?) Now Ming has won a Luce Fellowship to live and work in, of all places, Mongolia (her choice), and she has invited me to visit. I’ve been complaining for a long time about my unquenched wanderlust, my desire to go somewhere faraway and exotic. “How many times in your life is someone going to invite you to stay with them in Mongolia?” she asks me. Only once, I suppose, and that was it.

Then there’s Parker, who has been unique and Parker-esque from the time he was a child. He is brilliant and quirky and listens to the beat of his own drum (a tonbak). Parker hated high school, which I can completely understand, but he also had the courage to drop out, against everyone’s advice, and this was quite a few years before it became sort of cool and trendy for smart kids to do that. It certainly didn’t impair his academic career. I’m pretty sure Parker is a computer genius, but he’s also an avid juggler, an environmental activist, and a world traveler, among so many other things. Parker and I have shared some moments over the years, but to me one of the finest was when I ran into him at a demonstration against the then-pending invasion of Iraq a few years ago. We marched side-by-side for a stretch, united in our anger and our hope, still believing in those days that reason would prevail. And I felt proud of him. I often do.

Last week, Ming and Parker showed me slides on computer of their recent travels. Parker’s featured a soundtrack of carefully chosen music for each country he visited and a map at the start of each segment that zoomed in on the place we were about to see. Of course, being twenty-something is a foreign country in itself, and although I was just a whirlwind kind of tourist in that nation of youth, I enjoyed passing through, and they made me feel welcome. We were in a place near UCSB with strong coffee and wireless internet access, the kind of hang-out frequented by students for studying and socializing. I don’t remember how, but for some reason we got on the topic of Facebook and the fact that it was now open to everyone.

“Everyone? I asked. "Like even me?”

“Even you,” replied Parker. “You could sign up right now.”

I should clarify here that I am not in need of a new social network. My real interest in Facebook would be to have a new kind of access to my daughter’s world, to connect with her from a different angle. I know it’s dumb, but I wasn’t really thinking that deeply. I was also just curious, I guess. And it sounded kind of cool. And the tide was pulling me strongly toward the shore of twenty-something. And I was flotsam and jetsam, fallen overboard from the ship of middle age.

“Yes,” I said, “Let’s do it.”

And that’s how I came to have a Facebook page. Parker and Ming agreed to be my first Facebook friends. I went to their pages, looked at their networks, their groups, their long lists of friends, even their favorite books and quotes. There was so much information there. I couldn’t wait to go to my daughter’s page.

Parker and Ming looked at each other. “You can’t just go to someone’s page,” Ming explained. “She has to agree to be your friend first.”

I had been a bit hazy on this rule. “Is she YOUR friend?” I asked hopefully.

Parker and Ming looked at each other again. “Not sure about the ethics of showing your friend’s Facebook page to the friend’s mother,” Parker mused.

So there it was. Not only am I the oldest person on Facebook, but I am destined to have the fewest friends.

My husband advised me against it, but I did in fact ask my daughter to become my Facebook friend. I told myself it was all a sociological experiment. I knew she would reject me. I just wanted to see how exactly she would do that. She chose to ignore me, a good method. It’s effective and unambiguous but not hurtful. And I respect her for it.