nostalgia

A Memory Framed in Magnolias

Memory. Where to start? I’ve written so much about it. About the mysterious alchemy whereby small moments, inconsequential as we lived them, become significant, weighty memories, full of recollected details. About the way that certain songs can transport me back, instantly and vividly, to the past. About the occasional awareness of the memory of a moment even as I live it, the experience of present and future recollection colliding, the sparks of that collapse flickering in my mind. Also, about the way that I am losing my memory, my mind, the ability to juggle twenty things simultaneously that used to come so easily to me.

Today, I’m thinking about a specific memory, one that is framed in magnolia petals, flat beer, and laughter. My college senior spring. These weeks shimmer in my memory, so full are they of feeling, laughter, sadness, and promise. They are saturated with the impending farewell we all lived with: every single day was a step closer to leaving the campus we’d grown to love so much. We turned in our theses, the reunions fences and tents went up, and we marched inexorably towards our forced exodus from that sheltered and sunny place we’d spent four years.

Of course there was much of college that was not sunny or happy. There were difficult times, experiences that hurt me, and heartbreak. But when I think of April and May 1996, I’m hard-pressed to remember anything but the joy. It was, perhaps, my first taste of that special kind of joy, the kind that is haunted by the promise of loss, that has become so central to my experience now. This now-familiar happiness was thick with feeling, the reminder that an end was coming a viscous swirl through the fluid of every day.

What were those days like? I sit at my desk now and I can close my eyes and be back there, my mind a kaleidoscope of details recalled with startling lucidity. I turned in my thesis two weeks early, and I forgot to include my middle name on the cover and frontispiece. The entire campus seemed to burst into bloom at once, the magnolias riotous in their celebration of spring. The soundtrack included The Tide is High, Killing Me Softly, and Glory Days. Mission Impossible had just come out in the theaters, we all went to see it, and then spent many nights trying to dance to the main instrumental song from the soundtrack (very difficult). There was a heat wave and we set up baby pools on the back lawn of our eating club, sitting in them and running through sprinklers in the oppressive humidity.

At our eating club’s annual alumni dinner, some male alumni stood up and toasted the days before the club was coed. That was nice. Not. My friend wrote a thesis called I Love the Freedom of It about water imagery in Virginia Woolf’s novels, and we mocked her incessantly for that title. We studied for the final comprehensive exams in our respective majors and then sat for long hours in those beautiful lecture halls, writing in putty-colored exam booklets. As I sat in a wooden chair bolted to the floor, wracking my brain to identify a piece of prose on the exam, I looked at the shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows, watched the dust dance in the light, and felt aware of the centuries of life that this room had held.

Reunions arrived, ringing the bell that our time was truly almost up. On Thursday night we started at Forbes, at the Old Guard reunion, because they had good alcohol. We then made our way through all of the tents, visiting them all before the crowds arrived on Friday. Saturday’s P-Rade was hot and beautiful, and we stood for hours outside of Cuyler Hall, cheering ourselves hoarse. In our matching orange Gap t-shirts we drank warm cans of beer from ripped-open cases stashed on the lawn behind us. When it was our turn to fall into line, we marched across Poe Field field together, arms flung around each others’ shoulders, tears rolling down our faces as President Shapiro welcomed us to the alumni body. That night, wearing blue shorts, a cream J Crew wool cable-knit sweater, and flip-flops I bumped into a long-lost face and unexpectedly rekindled a relationship that had been dormant for two years and that I had presumed dead.

We spent a week driving all over the tri-state area for graduation parties. One night, Quincy and I decided impulsively, around midnight, to leave the party where we were. We drove through the night from the Hamptons to her parents’ house on the Jersey shore, singing Bob Marley the whole way. The next day, we made possibly the most labor-intensive recipe I’ve ever made, artichoke soup. Hand-scraping every single leaf of ten artichokes.  Another night, Kathryn‘s mother hosted us, hungover, and we ate vegetables and chugged water, all swearing we would never drink again (right).

Our rooms slowly disappeared into brown moving boxes. Our parents arrived for several nights of celebratory group dinners. We ran from a restaurant in town to the Senior Arch Sing, and because we were late we wound up sitting on the bottom step of Blair Arch, belting out “Eye of the Tiger” with our class as though our lives depended on it. My instinctive use of “we” to describe this time reminds me of The Virgin Suicides, and underlines how critically important my friends from this time of my life were and are. We really were a we then, and while that we has receded to secondary status, it is still a group identity that I draw strength and solace from.

We knew we were coming to the end of something, but also knew we were about begin something. Our real lives. “We prepared our hearts for something drenching and big,” writes Lorrie Moore in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and those words always reminded of these weeks of my life. We were liminal creatures, still in college but peering at the great wide open that lay just beyond the threshold that we were barrelling towards. We drank and danced and laughed and loved and left. I am so grateful that my memory has kept such a detailed, fully-dimensioned account of those once-in-a-lifetime weeks.

Susie’s courage

Courage. I’ve been thinking about this word, this concept, this idea, all weekend. Trying to figure out what to share for this inaugural Five for Ten post. Certainly I don’t feel I have much, so that was easy to dismiss. I kept coming back, over and over again, to Susie. Susie was like a mother to me, and I mean that literally. My sister and I grew up in the loose net of extended family known as the “Four Families,” something that to this day I am immensely grateful for. Susie was an integral part of this community, one of the four mothers who formed the corners of the tent under which we all sheltered.

Susie died at 49 of pancreatic cancer, and the way she faced her death is the most human and intimate experience of courage I’ve ever seen. I am still unfolding the immense wisdom she passed on to me – and everyone around her – in those last months. As her body withered, her face grew as luminous as it did bony. I see now that her physical body was just reflecting her passage towards the spiritual world.

I will never forget the months leading up to Susie’s death in the fall of 1997. For one thing, my grandmother died of the same kind of cancer in June. Pancreatic cancer suffused those months. My mother, even more surrounded by illness and death than I was, was intimately involved in Susie’s caretaking. There were a group of women who circled around her, supporting both her and her sons, in a way that I think of often now.

“Women do not leave situations like this; we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.” – Elizabeth Berg

This quotation, which I invoked recently to friends involved in similar caretaking, really captures what those months were like. I was nowhere near as intensely involved as my mother was, but I was still a part of the experience. Ethan, Susie, Mum and I had countless dinners on Susie’s sun porch. We sewed square for quilts. We attended caretakers meetings.

Experiencing Susie’s death was an exquisite, once-in a lifetime privilege. I learned more about death and, perhaps paradoxically (but maybe not), about life from her in those months than I can express. Susie faced death with extraordinary grace. Somehow she was able to say to those of us near to her: Yes, I am dying. But see, I am not afraid. And so we were not afraid. And though the crushing sadness remained, without fear, it was more manageable.

Susie was able to rise above her own emotions to provide solace and strength to those around her. She spoke honestly about her fears, her experience, her pain. But she also honored the great good fortune of her life and was able, somehow, to put her own need away so that she could reassure those close to her, take care of her boys, until the end. I can neither imagine nor fathom the strength it took for her to do that, to put her own need for reassurance behind her desire to comfort those around her. We were supposed to be taking care of her, but in fact it was the other way around. Hers was an amazing act of generosity; to this day I am humbled when I remember it.

Hilary shared with me a prayer that was said at one caretaker meeting that I did not attend. The closing line was: I believe all of our paths are perfect. I think of this often. If a woman who died before 50, leaving two young sons with everything in front of them, can find a way to feel at peace with that, I owe it to her memory to recognize the perfection – or at least the beauty in the imperfection – of my own path. To look at our lives, baldly and without pretense, to see the beauty even in the barrenness: this is courage.

Archeologist of the soul

For some reason I’ve had an image from one of my kids’ books, a Magic Schoolbus book about archaeological digs, in my head today. It’s a picture of an archaeologist crouching in the sand, sifting materials through one of those flat trays with a fine mesh bottom. Looking for pieces of treasure, fossils, messages from centuries ago.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been that archaeologist. Spurred on by my sense that something major was missing, I have been on a on a journey into my past to try to understand how I got here. To see how the tiny little choices, explicit and not, have led me to where I am now. When I think of the ways that tiny little things, each seemingly insignificant, can amount to the formidably immovable mass of a life, I always think of snowflakes: each so fragile, but together so powerful.

I have been sitting in the sands of my life, looking through piles of recollections both tangible (letters, photographs, old school papers) and intangible (memories). I sift carefully, shaking the tray side to side until most of the silt disappears through the mesh like water through a colander.  I wonder how it is that I choose the areas to sit and mine carefully; it seems random, but I imagine it is, like all things that seem coincidental, guided by some hand that I cannot see.

Most of the time all of the materials sifts through the tray, leaving nothing there. Sometimes I am startled by what remains, by a memory or a moment whose importance and power I had not realized. Other times I am not at all surprised to see the heavy lump of something there, in my hands, reminding me again of its impact on the shape of my life.  Some of the pieces, of fossil or of treasure, are anticipated, and some are not.  I take them carefully out of the sieve and place them in my bag.

As I proceed down the roads of my childhood and life until now, the bag grows slightly heavier, weighted with pieces that have made themselves meaningful enough to save.  The next task, I think, will be to read the code in these fragments, to piece them together and see the whole that is far larger than the sum of their disparate parts.  I’m nowhere near done on the dig site though.  There is much more sand to sift through, many more pieces, each of which allows a small part of the past to speak in the present, to find.

Magnolias, a stubbed toe, and Sister Golden Hair

During my run yesterday I was aware of the wild abandon with which the trees in my neighborhood have burst into bloom. The magnolias in particular always remind me, with visceral power, of spring in Princeton. Magnolias, their smell, their color, their silhouette against a blue sky, are as inextricably linked with my four springs at Princeton as anything else. After a week or so of ravishing prettiness, the gorgeousness of the petals seems too heavy for the branches and they fall, snowflake-like, into puddles around the tree. Magnolias are an apt metaphor for my college experience itself: stunning beauty, bursting into near-flame seemingly overnight, which fades just as suddenly. The bloom of those four years was more beautiful than I ever could have imagined, and when they ended, they left me with a memory of the smell of intensely sweet blossoms and innumerable moments etched into my mind.

One whose etching is particularly detailed, and deep, is of an early May day in 1993. It was houseparties, and none of my freshman friends and I had been invited to attend the Friday and Saturday festivities. Sunday’s lawn parties were, however, open to everyone, and we eagerly made our way down Prospect Street in the blazing sunshine. I was wearing jean shorts, an Indian-print tank top, and I had tucked a yellow dandelion flower behind one ear. My hair fell down to my lower back and like many of my friends I had that oh-so-becoming puffy look from drinking too much beer, (that I only recognized years later) and 20 pounds on myself now.

We spent most of the afternoon dancing at Ivy. A beloved band, the Dean Dollar Band, was playing on the club’s back porch. Drunk on sunshine, flat beer pumped from kegs on the lawn, and the twined-together close of our first year and promise of three more, we danced like fools. We were barefoot: we had piled our flip-flops on the slightly uneven brick stairs that came down from the back porch to the sloping lawn. I remember feeling very aware of the attention we were calling to ourselves. Dancing right up front by the band felt like an audacious act, a claiming of space, and I felt a little uncomfortable with it. I distinctly recall having the feeling I often had, even back then, of being both inside my body and my life and outside of it, hovering, watching. Privately, I suspected then as I do now that there is a part of me that simply never participates.

As I hung slightly back, I recall looking at my friends, feeling incredulous that women that wowed me so utterly were actually my friends. The embrace that I felt at Princeton was absolute, and it was tremendously healing after a couple of difficult years in New Hampshire. Sure, freshman year had had hiccups, and challenges, but I had finally, by May, relaxed into a group of friends and I felt relieved and grateful every day for them.

While that moment is crystalline in my memory, I’m not sure where in the afternoon’s timeline it occurred. At some point mid-afternoon, while the sun was still high in the sky but before we jumped into the fountain, I stubbed my toe. I know I was dancing with one of my roommates, and I remember her loose brown hair flying around as she bobbed her head. As I looked down to see that I was bleeding rather badly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Startled, I spun around to look into the deep brown eyes of a vaguely familiar looking upperclassman. “Do you need a band-aid?” he asked me. The very first words he spoke to me. I promise you, as unlikely as they are, they are remembered as romantic! I nodded mutely, still very surprised, and followed him into the cool, darkened interior of Ivy’s kitchen.

We talked idly as he looked through drawers for a band-aid. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember a frankly shocking and yet surpassing feeling of complete comfort. He was easy to talk to, to be around. We went back outside and sat on the porch steps, talking in the breaks between the band’s loud songs. I felt acutely the rough and sun-warmed bricks against the backs of my legs, bare in my cutoffs. Dean Dollar burst into a song I sort of recognized and he turned to me. “Do you know this song?” I shook my head. “Sister Golden Hair. It reminds me of you.” My face flushed and I stared at my band-aided big toe.

I did not know then that this man would be one of the most formative relationships of my life. I know that now, though. Seeing the magnolias yesterday, I was completely flooded by that moment in the sunshine, and reminded yet again of Ann Beattie’s line that “people forget years and remember moments.” This memory is one of the enduring, glittering ones for me. I forget about it for months but when it resurfaces it is always vivid, its contours familiar, its emotions heady. I write so often about these memories, the ones that my subconcious has curated into enduring, sturdy parts of my self. Memories whose power we can’t always anticipate when we live them, that shape who we are and how we see the world. When one rose up in my mind I decided to describe it.

Three moments

Friday

Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs).

I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one another but never in the same spot. It was an immense pleasure and treat to have a couple of hours to simply sit, and talk, and be. I am reminded over and over again about how important these friendships are, these women who knew me when I was becoming who I am now.

Saturday

Mother-daughter book club at our house in the afternoon. Grace chose a book called Grace for President which I adore. I actually wish the protagonist wasn’t called Grace, because that has nothing to do with why I like it. The book makes me choke up every single time I read it. It’s a great, empowering read for girls in elementary school (with a double bonus lesson about the electoral college).

We did something at book club that we have not done before, which is go around the room and have everyone read a page. There was something magical about those minutes, with girls hesitating before long words, reading aloud, voices growing in confidence as they forged ahead through a paragraph. I was mesmerized, looking around the room at these nascent girls, all tall and lean and angular, seemingly more so by the day, confidence and tentativeness wrapped up in each individual personality. Their eyes shone and their giggles erupted and their camaraderie was palpable.

Sunday

Palm Sunday church service with Mum, Grace, and Whit and then lunch with one other leg of the stool. I loved watching Grace and Whit with these friends that they are growing up with like family. I remember when each of these children was born, literally the day (and I’m not speaking of my own here!) – it really stuns me, as cliched as it is, that they are so big now.

All three moments speak of the themes that shape my life: the unstoppable advance of time, the way that certain moments present an opportunity to be still and really see into the life of things, the deep bonds of motherhood and friendship.  My life exists in the penumbra of my awareness of time’s passage, I know that now: the sadness and inevitability of each moment’s death colors it even as I live it.  Yet somehow I am also seeing that paradoxically, only by accepting this irrefutable truth can I actually, fully inhabit the time that I do have.