My dear childhood friend Susan recently sent me letters that I had sent her years ago, written in my mid-teens and twenties, a box full of them. The correspondence details experiences while away on high school vacations, my first explorations of and eventual move to San Francisco, first dates and intimate encounters, falling in love, my obsessions and aspirations. I’ve read only a few and I don’t recognize myself at all, or actually remember much of what I wrote about. I don’t even have any cells left in my body from that time–who was this person? I’m slowly cracking open these narrative chestnuts and unraveling the mystery of this strangely unrecognizable person who was me–or, who is me?
Much of the memories of my childhood are not memories at all. When I say that I remember something from my childhood, I’m actually saying that I remember the picture of it, from my dad’s slide shows. His slides begin in 1951 with my parents’ honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and their first few years in Germany when dad was stationed there as part of the occupying forces after WWII. The documentation continues through the births of my siblings, their childhoods, my childhood, up though my graduation from high school in 1984 and beyond. I and my brother Mark picking blackberries. Me snuggled on the couch with Sue. Our dog Zachary. My actual memories are a bit hazy, and are more associated with sensation: the feel of my dad’s mustache, going into convulsions with a 103 degree fever, the silent dark warmth before a tornado, kissing Kim on the trampoline…
On my first visit to Europe in 1988, I didn’t take any pictures. I wanted nothing clouding or mitigating my experience, nothing between me and my rendezvous with history, seeing Titians, da Vincis, Caravaggios with my own eyes, walking the streets that Atget walked, strolling along a canal that Rembrandt tossed pistachio shells into. I wanted those experiences to be in my head, only in my head. And I suppose that they are–somewhere in there–just not very accessible anymore. Now I take pictures of every pie I bake, every work of art I see, everyone I love, everywhere I go. My memories are now timestamped and embedded with GPS information. I couldn’t tell you if something happened 5 years ago or 20 without a picture of it.
Yet here are my own words, written to my best friend and confidante with no restraint, handwritten with no editing, nothing between brain and pen. I don’t remember seeing Psycho for the first time. Oh wait, I do. On TV, in 6th grade. And there was a commercial break in the middle of the shower scene, could you imagine? Anyway, I don’t remember what it was like to be the sum of only a few years of experience, with so much ahead of me, encountering so much that was new. I shared all of it with Susan. Reading these letters is probably going to be a lot like seeing Psycho the second time, years later, in the theater, Hitchcock’s vision suddenly and shockingly complete.