The Past is Never Dead

Because I'm sure you all don't want to read another post about shelving books and other library activities, how about a little trip down memory lane?

I went digging around in my digital archives last night to try to find some writing I did years ago that I thought I might be able to turn into a post. In 2006 or so I wrote a lot about my childhood and my life, partly because I'd gone to a therapist who encouraged it, and partly because I was hypochondriacal and convinced I was going to die (these two things are not unrelated), and I wanted to write down all my stories.

I was thinking specifically about a time when I "ran away" as a little kid, and went meandering aimlessly through my neighborhood until someone came and got me. I was sure I had written all that down and wanted to refresh my memory.

I got briefly distracted when I found the much more recent photo above, from May 2015, featuring Olga as a graceful young lady (!) watching Dave come into the living room. We'd just moved into this flat the previous summer, and I'm struck by how empty the place looks compared to now. And doesn't Olga look robust?! She was only about five years old then. (She got up with me this morning but now she's back in bed as I write this.)

I also found this picture, which isn't even mine -- it's something I took off the Internet because we used to have cups just like these when I was a kid. As I recall, I sold sets of them in 1978 or so as part of a school fundraiser for the marching band. Or maybe for the Boy Scouts.

Anyway, we wound up with a set and I have never forgotten them. My brother and I still talk about them. I have no idea what happened to ours, but similar cups are still available on eBay and other resale sites. I'm sure bazillions of them were made. They're very '70s.

I finally found the writing I was looking for. Here's a snippet:

The Central Florida that I knew as a child has disappeared from many areas. Back then, it was already suburbia, but sparsely developed. There were pine lilies in the vacant lots in autumn and vast tracts of palmetto and scrub. The road in front of our house was unpaved white limestone marl. Quail ran across our backyard in a single-file line, and mayflies blanketed the windows in spring.

The sunlight, the coarse grass, the pine needles, the fire ants. The sighing of the wind in the pines. The stinky, decayed smell of the muddy lakeshore. All of it is so deeply embedded in me that I feel like part of the land – I feel like the tannins that darken the water in Lake Wisteria are flowing through my veins. I may be part alligator.

A few paragraphs later:

(My brother and I) went “camping” together one day, packing our little school bags with slices of white bread and jars of water. We walked to the end of the road. Then Mr. Betz drove up and told us to go home, that Mom was worried, and so we did.

That's it?! Not quite the memory I have now, which is that I walked not only to the end of the road but to a distant part of an adjacent road, and that my brother wasn't with me, and that I was not "camping" but running away. But I may be conflating two different incidents, neither one particularly significant or eventful. I thought I'd written more. Oh well.

This is not my picture, but one my brother took last November while attending a remembrance for my mom at the church we grew up in. (And thus, also related to my childhood and this post!) I had no pictures of the sanctuary and I asked him to get some, having spent many hours staring up at those stained glass windows of Jesus, which at the time were shadowed by the fronds of a palm tree planted outside that back wall.

I suppose I'm thinking more about Florida now that I'm preparing to go back there in a week's time. One of the tasks my brother and I have planned is to spread my mom's ashes near where we grew up.

Anyway, thanks for indulging this rather disjoined trek down memory lane. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."