Self-isolation during our Great Pandemic affects the way we think. For some people, perhaps, it turns their minds to the Great Questions of human existence, to meditation, to speculative theology -- or speculative science fiction. Those are the admirable folks, the thinkers we envy, with either pleasure or bitterness.
For me however, as for many others, it turns our minds to reminiscence. To memories of happier and freer times. To great vacations we once enjoyed. To the happiness of families when our now-adult offspring were still children. To memories of our own childhoods.
We -- those of us who still subscribe to newspapers -- still find echoes of our collective concerns in the daily comic strips. I'm thinking, for example, of "Sally Forth" -- a strip featuring a married couple, Ted and Sally Forth, and their middle school daughter Hilary. All three are somewhat loopy, but the daughter often seems the most mature of the three. Since, like all of us, the Forths were unable to leave home for vacation travel this year, Ted has suggested that they dwell together in their joint memories of past vacations.
Which they have been doing recently, with strip after strip showing a younger couple and a much younger Hil. (The strip has become a bit darker in recent days as Sally has been talking to her moderately young but terminally ill father. How can you hold yourself together, she asks, knowing that you're about to die? He reminds her patiently that he died thirty years ago, and that she is talking to her memory of him.) But in general, the family has been happily reliving events like their first visit to Disney World, with Hil initially rolling her middle school eyes, before giving in and also immersing herself in their collective memories.
Maybe this strip seems weirder to many readers than it does to me. While my family never actually immerses itself in joint hallucinations of Olden Times, we certainly relive those experiences verbally in painstaking detail. Part of what makes my own self-isolation in Seattle painful is my inability to spend an hour or so daily talking over happy past times with others. "So there we were in Yellowstone -- I was just ten years old!" "No, you were nine." "No way! That would have made you only one year old, but you were walking and talking -- and you claim to remember parts of it." "Oh, maybe you're right!"
It can go on for hours.
I'm sure it's some form of mental illness, but trivial events of my childhood often seem more vivid than even the high points of my adult life. If it's a form of derangement, I suspect most of my family shares it -- although perhaps to a lesser degree.
Walking through my neighborhood a couple of evenings ago, about four blocks from my house, I passed a front yard with a couple of young teenage boys lying on the lawn talking. Like Proust's taste of a madeleine cookie, the sight instantly flashed me back to my old neighborhood as a 14-year-old boy. I felt my lost youth almost as vividly as Ted, Sally, and Hil found themselves reliving their glorious past visits to Disney World. I saw myself and neighborhood friends lying on a lawn in the Northwest summer twilight, maybe swilling cokes while talking, or maybe tracing slow circles in the street on our bikes like cowboys mounted on horses. Conversations that went on forever, about anything and everything and nothing.
Every age has its pleasures, and every age has its terrors. In our nostalgia, we forget the neighborhood bully, the procrastinated but now due English paper, the tedium of long summer days, the embarrassment of saying the wrong thing to to a group of friends and the resulting ridicule, the dull but growing worries (even at 14) of what the future might have in store, of whether we'll ever decide how to earn a living.
But the joys were also real, as were the frequent moments of relaxed contentment. In my moderately small Northwest logging town, I may not have recognized the Italian words dolce far niente, but I knew well the sensation of idle bliss they represented. They summed up the summers of my youth.
But my brisk walk this week left behind the kids talking together earnestly on the lawn, oblivious to my passing -- and to the instant flashback they inspired in me as I walked by. The flashback to my childhood probably persisted for less time than it's taken me to write this blog entry. My view of the talking boys, unlike Proust's madeleine, has sadly failed to result in six world-famous volumes of memories. Nor has it resulted even in the Forth family's day or so of collective hallucinations.
But it's a flashback that is often triggered, and one that will return again and again.
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