Summer Nostalgia

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. . . . In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.” 
                                           From Ignorance (2002), by Milan Kundera

In the summertime, nostalgia ripens like the sweet corn in the fields and the garden's fat red tomatoes.

The hum of the cicadas on a slow summer afternoon takes me right back to the lazy summers when I was a kid. Those summers often felt like torture to me. Outside of the routine of the school day, I felt that I would die of boredom. That, or the heat and humidity of Texas in the summer would strike me dead if I ventured outside my air-conditioned house.

In hindsight, though, what I would give to recapture that sense of an infinite day ahead of me to fill with lazy endeavors: stretching out on the hot spikes of Bermuda grass in the backyard and watching the ants carrying their treasures; sitting in front of the TV watching endless cartoons and sitcoms; reading a whole novel (or two) in one day.

Or the freedom to break up my lazy days with more active, often pointless, pursuits: diving for pennies in the city swimming pool; taking barefoot walks on my tiptoes to keep the bottoms of my feet from burning on the hot sidewalk; riding my bike to the 7-11 for an ice-cold Sprite or a package of Now and Laters; skipping rope for hours on the driveway; reaching through the neighbor’s fence to pick wild dewberries for pie.

            (I’m not alone in that summertime nostalgia. Fellow writers from Zee’s Writing Studio have shared a mosaic of summer memories at the Painted Parrot.)

Even though I have been cycling around in my childhood memories quite a bit lately, I am finding myself a bit wary about nostalgia. A friend asked me at lunch on Wednesday if I was nostalgic for the 1970s, the decade of my childhood. And my instinctive answer was an emphatic, “No.” (And not just because the ‘70s was the decade of gauchos and elephant-leg jeans and other fashion disasters.)

I am suspicious of nostalgia, of peering at the past through rose-colored glasses. It can be a false memory, a lie. It can mislead.

Nostalgia is the ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a fat old Dutch woman that I see on the shelf of an antique store. I recognize it as the same cookie jar that sat on the counter of my grandmother’s kitchen. But the nostalgic cookie jar is filled with homemade cookies. It is solidly domestic, nurturing and loving. It represents an ideal of womanhood that remained intact until the 1960s. That is the lie.

That sort of nostalgia would blind me to the memory of the empty cookie jar on the counter of my grandmother’s small kitchen. Because it is the emptiness that is truth.

Why does my grandmother even have a cookie jar on her counter? She never makes cookies. She gives me and my older brother and younger sister Mexican Gamesa cookies from a big cardboard box: gingerbread circles with icing so shiny it looks plastic, pink wafer cookies just this side of stale. I know she loves us and wants to give us treats, but the cookie jar is merely decorative. Aspirational. Maybe it is a remnant of a past that my great-grandmother lived; a symbol of a future that was taken away from my grandmother by my grandfather’s abandonment, by divorce.

In my grandmother’s apartment, aluminum foil and thickly lined drapes cover the windows and block out the sun. They close off the apartment in a low hum of air conditioning. The walls of the apartment are yellowed from nicotine and grease and worry as my grandmother sits in the brown vinyl chair and watches TV, alternately taking a drag on a cigarette, flicking ash into the ashtray, and chewing on her fingernails. The real cookie jar, and not the nostalgic one, is covered in a thin film of dust, grease, and nicotine.

Nostalgia wants to give me grandmother the icon, a false knowing. Maybe my memory wants to feed me a sweet picture because the truth of her death, of her permanent absence, is too painful. Because at its root, nostalgia equals loss. To feel nostalgia, we have to have lost something. Nostalgia is the pang of memory, a wanting to return to a place that doesn’t exist anymore. It is the suffering of an infinite journey, the emptiness of Penelope and Telemachus in Ithaca forever without an Odysseus.

The pain that nostalgia brings with it comes from the always not-knowing, the ignorance that I will forever carry with me. My grandmother is far away, and I don’t know what has become of her. No matter how many memories of my grandmother I retrieve from that cookie jar, she can’t ever be returned to me. She has taken part of me with her, a part that I can’t know completely without her.

Foraging, or Making Something from Nothing

"Nopales and tunas," Photo courtesy of MaryHelen Gallego (Photograndma)

My memory vexes me. It's spotty; it doesn't always perform on command. I remember faces really well, but names are often elusive. I often have to pluck a name, with great effort, from my memory by making it travel sideways through a series of associations to greet a friend I haven't seen for a while. Precise terminology and anything related to numbers--statistics and dates especially--seem even more diffuse and hard to recall as I get older.

It's scary not to remember something that you once knew so well. When I was in first grade, the age my youngest son is now, I had a vague sense that life was static and that I would always live in Freer, Texas and be best friends with Elsa Garza and Gilda Lopez and remember how tall and imposing but sweet Mrs. Hatch, our teacher, was. It's disconcerting to get to a certain age and realize that, other than a few friends, I don't remember the names of my first grade classmates who loomed so large in my emotional world at that time. And the adults that I counted on to know things--family stories, genealogy, the year of the great hurricane, the location of my Uncle Leo's first apartment, the recipe for grandma's empanadas--are getting hazy in their memories as well or have passed away. 

When I am sitting down in front of my computer to write or sitting in the circle of my writing group, this awareness of my memory's limitations makes me anxious because the writing of fiction for me seems so intertwined with memory. 

A character's clothing or personality, a setting real or imagined, the events that form a story--all are rooted somewhere in the writer's memory. 

Inspiration bubbles up from the well of memory: fragments of a remembered dream, the imagery from an oft-repeated story, the melody of a song, the name of a flower or tree, a frozen treat or childhood game.

Memories of past experiences, as a participant or merely an observer, inspire and add verisimilitude to a story. Historical facts and obscure bits of knowledge, augmented by research, flesh out details of a story's setting or events.

Given how spotty recall can be, memories become a form of fiction as well. The brain fills in details when memory fails, creating a story that is part truth and part invention.

I've been learning that, spotty, fictionalized memory or no, I have to just plunge in to the writing and see where it leads me. And sometimes memory and its associations lead me to very unexpected places.

In late May I sat next to my daughter at a mother-daughter writing workshop at the public library. The inspiration was a table quilted with Pantone color swatches. My daughter chose blues and greens and wrote (with clarity and depth) of water and overcoming her fear of it. I chose Caramel, Cactus Flower, and Whisper Pink. Cactus Flower led me back to the nopal cactus that is native to the chaparral of South Texas, where my parents and their parents and grandparents and my siblings and I were born. Caramel made me think of making candy, and somehow the two added up to a story about making candy from the red tuna, or fruit, of the nopal. (You can read the piece, "The Color of a Prickly Pear's Heart," at Painted Parrot by clicking here.)

Even now I don't really know how I knew about prickly pear candy. When I was writing, I didn't even know if it existed for sure, though the plunging-ahead part of my writing brain took it as a given. Later on I Googled the term and emailed my dad's cousin, the family genealogist, to see if the story I wrote might have some basis in fact. I didn't need confirmation that what I was writing was true--it is fiction after all--but that it could be true. Somehow the effectiveness of the story demanded that reassurance. My relative spoke with my great-aunt and confirmed that my great-grandmother and her sister-in-law made cactus candy. 

A flood of other memories about foraging for sweet (and not so sweet) natural treats met my original question about cactus candy. My father's aunt and cousins recalled picking and eating capulis, comas, duranillios, anacuas, and moras. My great-grandfather roasted quiote, the flower of the Spanish dagger plant, which tasted like steamed broccoli stalks or boiled cabbage (how could something so exotic taste so ordinary?). My dad's cousins chewed on the sticky chaguete from mesquite trees. 

Sadly, my dad and his cousins don't have any direct memories of making cactus candy or seeing it being made. But through some sort of alchemy of memory, that story was delivered to me. I think it says something about how difficult life was for my ancestors, how they managed to raise their families on the ranches of South Texas by foraging in a dry, rugged land for whatever sweetness they could find.

Prickly pear blossoms, Scottsdale, Arizona

When I Was Little

Me (6, on right) and my sister, c. 1972 

It's so easy to get discouraged about achieving big goals: losing weight, writing a book, running a marathon, for examples. Sometimes they loom so large and feel outside the grasp of any one person living in the real-life world of working, paying bills, mowing the lawn, feeding kids, cleaning house.

I don't have any big achievements to report. However, I keep re-teaching myself the power of consistency and breaking down big goals into small, achievable outcomes.

For the last few months I have been writing twice a week. That adds up to only a few hours of writing and sometimes only a few paragraphs a week that I like. But I feel that through this consistent effort, small though it is, I am setting a good practice for myself. Each time I write it seems a little easier to step into and ride the creative waves.

I love feeling a part of a community of writers in my weekly writing group and the energy we generate at each meeting. I get so much inspiration from the stories I hear in the group. I have this empowering sense of the infinite number of stories there are to tell and ways to tell them. You can read some of these stories at paintedparrot, including a recent submission of mine: "When I Was Little."

Rotation

The globe sat on the corner of Mrs. Litchenburger's desk. My 2nd-grade classmates and I sat in rows of wooden desks facing hers. We bent over our worksheets after she had given out instructions in her calm, sweet voice. After a few minutes, a line of children would form at her desk. We probably could have worked out the math problems on our own, but at the first sign of trouble we gravitated to her desk for help, pulled by her warmth, her unlimited patience, her gentle humor.

As I waited, I picked up the stapler on her desk, liking the heft of it, the click-thunk as it incised metal lines on my worksheet. I even drew blood once from my index finger after wondering if it could pierce flesh.

But the best piece of entertainment on Mrs. Litchenberger's desk was the globe. The oceans were a light aquamarine, the continents a range of browns and greens and spots of white that blurred as I spun the globe. It was tippy when spun fast, so I held on to the metal base as I watched North America whirl past and the wide blue of the Pacific emerge from the other side. After several dizzying rotations, I pressed my finger down to stop it at a point on the vast and exotic People's Republic of China or the neighboring Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Peking. Leningrad. The place names were meaningless to me and, I have to admit, didn't evoke much curiosity. What I loved was the mad spinning that made every big city and little town and huge continent and little island seem insignificant. I enjoyed the abrupt stop and the randomness of where my finger would land.

Now, as an adult, I feel much more like the spun than the spinner, twirled about as I face the demands of even ordinary days: getting the kids out of bed and fed and on their way to sports practice and school, paying bills and looking for ways to balance the budget, keeping the clutter and germs and bugs in the house and the weeds outside the house under control, short trips for shopping or ferrying the children around, etc.

I try to stop the spinning briefly to land on some island of time that's all my own, a foreign land that is still and quiet where I can hear my own thoughts and shape them into a narrative. Most days that effort seems beyond my control, spun up and around by the appointments on my calendar, my head spinning and unfocused.

But this morning, I seem to have landed on that little island briefly, after a day of tending to a sick child and an early night. A few other things have brought me to this place of memory, of drawing lines of connections between past places and present. This morning I received an email from a dear friend who is going through earth-moving changes. An email last week from my neighbor and writing friend Natalie reminds me that it is important to visit that place of creativity as often as I can, to situate myself in the place I live now and to share its ordinary meaning and beauty with my friends and loved ones.

The web, with its ever-multiplying places to visit, seems to be spinning by me at too fast a pace to keep up with. But I wanted to share a few places where I have been hanging out lately and spending some time:

Nesting Great Blue Herons at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology
Live from Daryl's House
Monthly digital calendars (and daily creativity) from Geninne
Of Monsters and Men
Vlogbrothers (this one's from my daughter :) )
PaintedParrot (Natalie's evocative "I Would Like to Paint" is here)

I hope life is spinning around at a pace that's just right for you.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring Color

Creative Window

My Daydream Window 

"You're working on a creative problem, and then all of a sudden that feeling of progress disappears ... What you should do then — when you hit the wall — is get away from your desk. Step away from the office. Take a long walk. Daydream. Find some way to relax. Get those alpha waves. Alpha waves are a signal in the brain that's closely correlated with states of relaxation. And what scientists have found is that when people are relaxed, they're much more likely to have those big 'A ha!' moments, those moments of insight where these seemingly impossible problems get solved. So when you hit the wall, the best thing you can do is probably take a very long, warm shower. The answer will only arrive once you stop looking for it."

Jonah Lehrer, Imagine; How Creativity Works

Maple Moon

For hundreds of years before the first Europeans arrived, the Cayuga band of the Haudenosaunee (the "People of the Longhouse," also known as the Iroquois) built their timber longhouses in the area of upstate New York where I live. According to the 2000 census, more than 80,000 people in the United States are descendants of these First People.

The Haudenosaunee divide the year into lunar months, each with a name that describes an important seasonal event. Last week's full moon is known as the Maple Moon, the time when the sap starts to flow again in the maple trees after the long winter of dormancy, and maple syrup and maple sugar production begins.

That poetic name for the March full moon provided a starting point for a story that I wrote in Zee's Writing Circle, which I mentioned in my previous post. The "spark" for that particular Circle was a rainbow of Pantone color samples that Zee spread out on a table. I chose:

Nile Blue

Coral

Mimosa

(Can you see those colors in the opening photo I took of the March sunset? It was probably not coincidental that I was drawn to those particular hues.)

Zee has just started posting stories written in Circle at her online literary journal, "Painted Parrot." I hope you'll visit every Friday when she posts a new story, or perhaps even subscribe to get a story in your inbox every week. You can read my Maple Moon story by clicking here.