Growing up in the 70s it’s hard to reconcile the kid I was then with the person I am now. A shoebox full of Polaroids and old prints, in the days before smartphones when everyone looks surprised by the camera, caught off guard. Dad crossing the frame with a cat dangling from his arm, mom bleached out by the flash, a neighbor caught between a blink. Those times feel less manicured, more innocent. As if a piece of us really was taken by the camera’s eye, not given but stolen. Call it the scraps, what bits of us escape the greedy maw of time.

There is a little store on the corner of 15th and Tilghman where they once sold model trains. It looks grayed over with urban street grime but it could just be my memory of Northeastern Pennsylvania, of small towns fanning out from Philadelphia northwards. A faded shop sign from the 1950s with some kitschy-looking design, a shop owner who emerges from the back when the screen door slams shut. It’s always cold and snowy in this scene, but that city snow that’s mottled, slushy. Dad as excited as I am, maybe more, pointing to the displays: miniature trains twisting through elaborate scenes, hillsides dotted with snow-covered trees, small amber-lit villages, happy people out waving with their pets. The detail is unreal, this miniature world, frozen scenes from the past. I would go back but you can’t really. I don’t even know what it was called.

Or the movie theater on Hamilton street by the old prison. The entryway would be shadowy with signs of water damage on the walls and a mildewy smell like it really needed airing out, but nothing the scent of popcorn couldn’t fix. Dad and I one afternoon watching Jason and the Argonauts, me thinking I want to remember this all my life: the opening scene of a soldier on the beach sliding a spear in and out of the sand. Could a memory like a physical thing be saved? How is it I have this still?

Or dropping my mom off at work with dad one day, downtown. The look of her fading from the car window as she gets smaller and the radio plays a song called “More than a Feeling.” I don’t know what I was trying to hold onto but memory and identity fused for me then, this pattern of childhood, an imprint.

You will go on to find the album in a used record store (also on Hamilton) for $3. And then as a teenager start buying cassettes. The feel of one brand new, unwrapped in cellophane, using your thumbnail to loosen a corner. How they kept the tapes in those anti-theft plastic contraptions and the clerk would pop it out at the cash register and toss the plastic anti-theft thing in a large box, the hellish racket it made. You are moping about town in a thrift store Kashmir coat with that tape in your Walkman. Somehow stewing in your own sorrow gives you a stronger sense of yourself. You get so good at it it becomes a kind of profession. But it’s probably a real turnoff.

There is just a sliver of color over the horizon but it lights the snow-covered valleys and mountains, that combo of indigo, gray and white. You want to be off in those hills because you’re an escapist or dreamer or thrill seeker, a loner at heart. All your strength is in self fortification, walled off.

The moody winter sunrises with their dim aspect and the calligraphic trees drawn in the foreground, the mute vibe of the forest as it lays beneath a carpet of leaves. There’s a hush of far-off cars or it could be the thrum of the freeway, the sound that’s an absence of sound, all that fills the vacuum, some metallic clunk of a truck, a jet, an engine whirring. All my sense is here, in my skin, my limbs. Who I am doesn’t matter a bit. Just an inch of color beneath a bank of dark, swollen clouds. 

Funny we would spend all our lives working so hard to establish ourselves and then feel such a sense of relief when it was time to let it go. We knew life was only loss so why not take as much as we could for as long as we could? They’d just make us empty our pockets and return everything in the end. Maybe that was art, finding a place to hide it. Or a way to recycle what was already lost.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, identity, prose, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, identity, Memoir