Person on the Page

A few days ago, I heard from my old friend, Jake. We last talked when we were high schoolers, probably in 1977, in the school cafeteria. We were part of a lunch bunch then, known among our classmates as The Family.

Now, after all these years, Jake contacted me online. That made me smile. Texting with him seemed strange for many reasons, but mainly because the last time we communicated, texting didn’t yet exist.

We caught each other up as best we could with the events of our lives during the decades that have passed since we cheered at football games, dressed up for proms, suffered through Mr. McKinney’s biology lectures, took our SATs, and trooped through the hallways of high school on our way from childhood to adulthood.

All he did was mention her name, and I found myself transported back to eleventh grade at Fort Hill High School in Cumberland, Maryland.

. . . . .

Jake told me that after his mother died a few years ago and he was cleaning out her house, he discovered some old photographs he hadn’t seen before. He forwarded one of them to me, a black-and-white picture of a man with two small children.

“That’s me sitting next to Dad,” he explained, though he didn’t have to, since the resemblance of the child to the man was remarkable. “And that’s Amy sitting on his lap.”

Amy. Seeing her name prompted an explosion of memories.

Jake’s sister Amy was my age. She had been in some of my classes at Fort Hill. We had mutual friends. In our junior year, she died in a car accident.

The mention of Amy’s name lit up images from that time: the shock that rippled through the high school, the collective grief, the funeral, and Jake’s heroic effort to mask what must have been crippling pain and get on with his life.

Just that one word texted to my phone transported me back to that time in the 1970s when our technicolor, small-town, teen-centered world was grayed over by tragedy.

…..

I am a student of memory.

Much of my career as an English professor has been devoted to reading what people write about their pasts in autobiography, memoir, and personal reflections — what is commonly called life writing.

Exploring how writers choose to tell stories about themselves — how they shape a chaos of experience into narratives — has provided me with insights into the ways we remember. I have studied what researchers have discovered about memory, about how our past experiences are either encoded in our minds to be recalled when prompted or fail to be encoded and are lost to us forever.

But my study of memory goes beyond my career. It’s personal.

I am a memoirist. To understand myself in the present, I probe my past. I write about what I remember, scanning my mind for flashes from long ago.

One night I hear a train whistle, for instance, and I’m four years old again, on a train with my mother, going to visit my grandmother. But not exactly.

Actually, my mother caught my father with another woman, and she is leaving him, running back home to her mother and taking me with her. As a four-year-old, I understand none of this. I just know that something is wrong. I’m told only that we are going to Grandma’s house, and she will have dinner waiting for us when we arrive. When I hear that train in the distance, the scene and all its complications return to me.

Sometimes, seemingly unbidden, I remember the squareness of my father’s shoulders in the suits he wore to work, or the scent of Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew, my mother’s perfume.

I watch for the memories that insert themselves into my daily thoughts. I wait, knowing they will make themselves known. But how?

Randomly? When the time is right? Or prompted by a stimulus in the present?

A name mentioned after many years?

…..

Jake and I reminisced about our high school years. I asked him what kind of car he was driving back then when he took a group of us for a spin through the narrow, crumbling streets of Cumberland. As we descended the steep, wooded hill where Braddock Road leads into the suburbs of LaVale, he accelerated, launching us over a dip in the road. For a few seconds we, a huddle of thrill-seeking teens, found ourselves airborne.

“1974 Plymouth Satellite,” he reminded me.

A few years after that, a teenager who launched himself over that dip in the road lost control of his vehicle and died when his car skidded and smashed into a tree. At that time, I wondered how painful it would have been for Jake’s mother if it had been us—Jake and his friends—who had crashed into that tree. What would it have been like for her to lose both Amy and Jake in the same year?

“I’m a much more responsible driver now,” Jake insisted. “Now I drive a Kia.”

Amy’s funeral was held on the same day as the Fort Hill football team’s homecoming game. That day, hundreds of high schoolers had to decide whether to cling to youth and cheer for their team or rise to adulthood and pay their respects to the dead.

…..

But I’m not thinking about death. Not really.

I’m thinking about language—the ways we communicate with each other across time and space.

As I texted with Jake, I considered what was happening. Am I chatting with the 66-year-old man, retired now and living in Florida, who decided to contact me?

Or am I texting the 17-year-old boy I knew back home in Cumberland? And am I writing to him as the 65-year-old woman I am now or as the 16-year-old girl I once was?

In the slippery world of friends with a shared history, I suspect that all four of us were in the conversation. As we texted, Jake and I were suspended in a timeless realm where we could be our past and present selves simultaneously.

Like those moments long ago when his car left the surface of the road and for a few seconds held us in air, the time we spent texting allowed us to hover for a few minutes above the linear march of time. We could be all of our selves—past and present—at once.

When I think about what stirred in me when he mentioned his sister’s name, I’m not thinking about death. I’m thinking about how a single word communicated by an old friend can jettison one instantly into a past emotional state—in this case, one weighed down by tragedy, toppled by loss.

Author David James Duncan likens our memories to river teeth: the dense knots of wood that remain after a tree falls and succumbs to the disintegrating effects of moving water. He invites us to imagine the past as a tree fallen into a river, disintegrating. After much of the tree has washed away, some compacted, immovable knots of memory remain. Those help us create the stories we tell about ourselves.

But I think that the past inhabits our minds as a night sky dotted with stars. A darkness, mostly, where points of distant light—our memories—glimmer.

Sometimes a sound, an object, an aroma, an old photo, or the mention of a name ignites one of those points. It bursts and blazes in our minds—a shooting star, illuminating a moment, allowing us to see again a scene from our past.

An old friend contacts me. He mentions a name that lights a darkness. It catapults the past into the present. Then for a few moments, I am suspended there, in both the then and the now. I’m both young and old, held timeless—as if airborne.

In the light of such shooting stars, I write my story.

Cover Photo: Laura Russian at Pexels