Right now I'm thinking a lot about memory, familiarity, and nostalgia.
I am still processing all the theory going on behind this, but here are a couple memories that have resurfaced in the last couple days, for a myriad of reasons.
(1) When I was a petite gamine, my dad created a cycle of stories he used to tell about two little girls, Gracie and Grossy. Anyone read "William Wilson" by Poe lately? This set of stories my dad told were of a similar sort: one obedient, happy, intelligent little girl named Gracie and her evil twin Grossy. I couldn't repeat a single story today if you asked me to, but I remember my dad teaching, through narrative, lessons as diverse as that when your friends are mean, it's probably because they're insecure, or that when you do what Mommy says, everything goes a lot more smoothly. Maybe this is where my love for stories was born...
(2) Little phrases. My dad used to start the stories he told me about his childhood, "Back when I was a little girl..." He inherited this from my mom's father, who has five daughters (and a son at the very tail end of the family) and a really great sense of humor. But this line frustrated me to no end, just like it frustrated my aunts and mother before me. "Dad! You were never a little girl! Duh!"
And that's not the only line my dad got from Grandpa Dale. When his girls would tell him his breath stank, he replied, "Well, it's better than no breath at all!" My dad still uses that one.
(3) My family's first house in Kansas. This is the house tied to most of my memories from childhood. I learned to roller blade on the street in front of the house. I used to yell, "I like Parker!" or "I like Michael!" or "I like Cody!" (depending on the week, ha) from the swing set in the back yard, telling my secrets to the soybean field behind the property. We used to see deer in that field on Sunday mornings and say, "Look! The deer are going to church!"
I drive by that house every time I visit home. We moved out of that house when I was twelve, but it still has this strange attractive force on me. It's really an uncanny experience to visit it - and I mean "uncanny" in the sense of German "unheimlich": that which is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Though that house holds so many familiar memories, the place itself is alienating to me. A new family has moved in, changed the landscaping, and painted the house - it's no longer the place of my childhood in spite of the familiar elements: the outline of the house, the number of lamps on the street, the shape of the cul-de-sac.
In spite of the changes, the unfamiliarity I'm confronted with every time I visit, the place has some strange pull. There's something at once comforting and disorienting about the experience. And I think I relish that. Maybe it's because though there's a sense that "there's no going back," the memories of my child are somehow immortalized in that place, or in my idea of that place, and being at that specific geographical location triggers those memories.
I think this plays into what Chase mentioned on my last post - Pierre Nora's writings on national history and "realms of memory" with which I am shamefully underacquainted. (I think I just invented that word. Run with it.) As I understand it, Nora links communal cultural memory to the objects and physical locations where we commemorate and enact these abstract memories. The same has to be true for an individual's own narrative of his life: certain places are wrapped up in certain abstract memories.
But more reading required on this one.
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