Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
(So there are apparently people actually reading this. Hello to all of you, especially Ash, Daniella and Nicole who I miss terribly and cannot wait to see ASAP-- ESPECIALLY YOU NICOLE.)
When I was a very little girl, many, many years ago, my parents would read to me every night before I went to sleep. I would pick a theme for the night and my mother would pick three books that related to the theme from the sizable library of picture books that I had accumulated even before I was three years old.
My favorite book at this time was a short book of poems whose real name has been lost to the sands of time, remembered in our household only as “The Bug Book,” so called because of the illustrated bug on the back cover.
I LOVED the Bug Book. I made my parents read it to me every night without fail for going on a year. They can both still recite every poem from memory, eighteen years later, despite the fact that my dad was floating around on a boat in the Great Lakes for significant portions of this time.
In retrospect my parents obviously deeply regret this tradition since it probably contributed directly to them now being obligated to pay Duke lots of money so I can spend all my time reading novels and becoming a liberal. Yet despite knowing very well what the dire consequences might be, my mother still reads to my sister every night.
My well-loved copy of the Bug Book might still be floating around our house somewhere, the cover long since lost, the pages torn and filled with my rudimentary attempts to write my own name. But it would be hard to locate among the masses of books our home houses.
My own collection has always been large—by the time I was ten I required a converted floor-to-ceiling china cabinet to house them all and they still barely fit. My father once broke a rib and had to be hospitalized after attempting to move my bookcase without taking the books off. My current collection covers the better part of an entire wall of my bedroom, with supplemental shelving tucked in other nooks and crannies but I’m running out of space again. I don’t even want to think about the sweat that will be expended moving this burgeoning library to my-yet-undreamt-of apartment in a city TBD once I graduate.
All this by way of saying that I was surrounded by books since birth; hell even before birth—there are pictures of my mother at my baby shower receiving the copy of Goodnight Moon that is currently falling apart on my sister’s bookshelf, which is, of course overflowing with books and sits next to a basket filled with even more stories of Little Bear and the Magic School Bus.
(Recently added to the collection were my still-cherished copies of the American Girl books, which my sister has delighted in. If she stays on my good side she stands to inherit the almost complete collection of Baby-Sitters Club books that are currently gathering dust in my closet.)
(The cover of Meet Samantha still has the grid lines on it that my mother used back when she was a good little stay at home mom to make a poster-sized image for the game “Pin the Hat on Samantha” which we played at my American Girl themed 6th birthday party which also featured homemade pettifours in lieu of birthday cake. Absolutely no one is surprised that I had a book themed party when I was barely old enough to read. Everyone is just praying that I don’t insist on one for my 21st.)
We’re book people to the last—my mother’s night stand always houses Linda Ellerby and historical biographies while my father’s side has a pile of Wolfe and Twain. The disaster area that my brother calls a room has dozens of sports and fantasy books mixed in with the dirty socks and unfolded laundry. Long drives were passed by listening to books on tape ranging from The Hobbit to Faith of My Fathers. We once navigated the battlefields of the South using nothing but a Civil War encyclopedia and AAA maps.
(Side note: New Orleans? Really likes Confederate war heroes. Jefferson Davis has multiple streets and sites named after him and I round through Lee circle every morning, overshadowed by the ENORMOUS statue of the man himself that guard the entrance to downtown. It’s very weird.)
Similarly, I’ve been surrounded by college my entire life. My parents liked school so much that they’ve spent most of my life attending more of it, racking up three graduate degrees between them and my dad is always thinking about getting his doctorate so he can torture students himself. I attended my first college graduation when I was three months old, watching my father shake hands with Ronald Reagan and receive his commission, and I have attended four for my parents in total, before ever going to one of my own.
Before Duke was ever a prospective college for me, it was an overgrown playground. I rolled down the hill in the Garden basin on sunny afternoons, played Polly Pocket in the Fuqua student lounge when the blizzard of 97 canceled school for a week and got dinner at the BC when Hurricane Fran roared up 1-40 to knock out power everywhere but campus.
Even before that I had watched my mother write term papers while we danced around to Animal ABCs and modeled for her end of term black and white photography project. That was the year I was in kindergarten and it made perfect sense for everyone in the house to start getting up and going to school every morning.
A decade later I would spend a cramped month sharing a room with her while we were apartment hunting in Gainesville, waiting for the rest of the family to be able to move down. We’d both needed to start school in January—her classes in law school and me in the magnet program that pretty much changed my life but only accepted my on the condition that I would begin classes the next day.
I didn’t have (many of) my books with me so I spent my evenings flipping through Mama’s law books and quizzing her on her notes, the same way that I now flip through Amanda’s physics book and quiz Danielle on her Italian. It’s no wonder that I spent half a decade convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer and still haven’t ruled it out completely.
The atmosphere in which I grew up so clearly directed me to becoming the person who I am today that I can hardly fathom the extent of it. It seems patently obvious that daily engagements with the Bug Book set me on the path to being the ardent English major I am today, that witnessing a decade of higher education first-hand imparted the psychotic urge towards college that got me to Duke, that afternoons spent in our sun-dappled breakfast nook reading the front page of the Wall Street Journal instilled the global awareness that I am now in the process of expanding through my participation in Duke Engage.
As such, the question of education gets a little tricky for me. I can’t even conceive of how its possible to compensate for the lack of that sort of pervasive literacy, that assumed path towards higher education, the exposure to the sort of wide-ranging political and social conversation and debate that has dominated every family dinner that I’ve ever sat at.
I was spoiled rotten intellectually. But in New Orleans and other inner-city school districts (and truth be told, many rural ones as well) you find yourself with classes of students who might not have any books in their homes. Even those who come from families who aren’t that bad off still often come from families where no one has ever gone to college. Only 2 out of every ten students who begin high school in Orleans Parish will enroll in college—a self-perpetuating statistic because when no one is expected to go to college and therefore they aren’t prepared for it.
(There’s a digression to be had here into whether that’s such a bad thing. I’ve read multiple opinion pieces that have opined that the increase in college enrollment isn’t necessarily the best thing for every student and that many would be better served by technical and vocational skills. And it’s true that the average plumber makes more annually than most English majors. Maybe the whole mania about college is a trope of the middle class. But I (have to) believe that every student deserves to be made aware of all their options and adequately prepared to pursue which ever option they choose.)
I am not the first or the last to contemplate this question and solutions have been proposed, many centering around the directive to get the kids as early as possible and start compensating. Charter schools start young, extend the school day over as much of the entire day as possible and drill the idea of college into the students’ heads at every opportunity.
New Orleans is the great test lab of charter schools and the outcomes of the schools currently chartered come the year 2010 will undoubtedly have a great impact on both education in New Orleans and the charter school movement as a whole.
I think that education can overcome whatever lacks might exist in the home environment. As much as I just spent two pages detailing the ways in which my family and home produced the person I am today, I recognize the innumerable impact of the whole slew of wonderful teachers from whom I had the pleasure and honor to learn. And even all of those as vertical factors, excluding the impact of horizontal variables such as contemporary events and the achievement-oriented zeitgeist of my entire generation.
Charter schools may, in retrospect, reveal themselves to not be a solution so much as a transition step between the lingering school model of yesterday which anyone interested in progressive education will explain is a remnant of both rural education in the one room school houses of the American frontier and of the system of education designed to produce factory workers.
Well there ain’t no more frontier and we’ve off-shored all the manufacturing so the model seems to have outlived its usefulness. There’s this great feeling in educational theory that something new is coming that’s gonna revolutionize the way we teach our youth, that paradigm is going to not just shift but spiral away, so grab hold of your protractors, it’s going to be a wild ride.
In the mean time, New Orleans needs to do something with its schools but quick. Jim Kelly stated it very well during our dinner Tuesday: people simply will not come back unless they have a place to put their children. Moreover, many refugees have put down roots and seen what a functional school system looks like and they aren’t going to be satisfied with anything resembling the status quo.
Now I like charter schools. Its hardly like I’m the product of an average public school education, I spent seven years in magnet programs, receiving an internationally sanctioned liberal arts education, and even before that I benefited from gifted classes. But you can’t have every school in a district be a charter school or magnet school. And you can’t have the normal schools suck. So what do you do with everyone else?
This weekend we went to a whole slew of museums and I left the WWII museum in particular more than a little bummed out. To be entirely over simplistic about it, war sucks.
But I was more haunted by the exhibit we saw at the Contemporary Arts Center. A local professional photographer had his entire back collection of prints and negative ruined in the floodwaters. They sat for days in not just water, but in what was described as “toxic sludge,” the chemicals ensuring that the photos were the most part totally lost.
But some frames among them still had traces of the original image discernible among the unintelligible swirls of pigment and light. He’d taken these and worked with them, layering more chemicals and effects on them in order to produce a whole host of haunting images, which often seemed more moving than the original works might have been, especially in the case of the many catalogue shots. I’m sorry but the artfully blurred swirls of fuchsia that surround a single staring eye is more evocative (though not provocative) than the bikini-clad model that the eye was clearly once attached to.
Since the theme of today’s entry seems to be childhood nostalgia, thinly guised as NOLA-relevant commentary, it seems apropos to discuss why the exhibit really got to me.
As my long-suffering friends will tell you, I am a chronic photo-taker. (I do not say photographer because my photos aren’t really art, they’re mementos. It’s the difference between a journal and a novel, which incidentally is the same public/private distinction that blogs so inherently traverse.) The day I got my camera is the day the sickness began; this very laptop runs too damn slow because of the 10 gigs of photos hogging all the space on my hard drive. I love the awkward candid.
I’d like to argue that I come by the habit honestly: my grandmother has over fifty years worth of photo-albums in her living room in South Florida. When I was younger and they lived in the big house, these albums lived in the den where I always slept while visiting and I would spend hours pouring over the pages, absorbing images of relatives who had died before I was even born and parties which had transpired before I was even a pressing reality.
Of course, my favorite album is the one dedicated to my first year of life (it’s good to be the first grandchild). The album is light blue with rows of tiny cream-colored flowers running strips up and down its covers. The pages are full of pictures that begin with me being one ugly little newborn to a plump peanut attending my father’s graduation to the infamous “Jabba-the-Meg” phase to my first birthday, celebrated in SoFla sporting a kicky little sailor dress.
And yes, chronic narcissism demands that I look at the album every time I visit my grandparents. But I love to look at all the pictures—even when I was a teenager it still amused me endlessly to see the pictures of my father and aunts and uncles at the same age, moreover my grandparents as teens. I’ve always taken the most interest in them and it’s been long understood that I will inherit the bulk of them someday.
It’s not a unique urge in the slightest—my sister and younger cousin can be effortlessly entertained by the screensaver on my grandmother’s computer, squealing with glee every time they recognize the cameras subject (which they incidentally often are).
So what killed me about the exhibit were the family photos that were included. If something were to happen to my grandmother’s albums it would be the loss of nearly a century’s worth of family history. And that’s exactly what happened to this man and countless other families in not just New Orleans but the entire Gulf Coast. These family photographs are so crucial and yet so fragile, tested by mere dampness, much less a total deluge.
The arts scene suffered particular losses—studios and recording and paintings were lost to the winds and the water. But the personal losses still seem the hardest. Mad talked about coming to gut houses over spring break 2006 and the immense gratitude of those for whatever personal items they could spare.
They lost not only the photos, but the tiny memorials of memory that we take for granted, the type of things I keep in neatly labeled shoeboxes, one for each year, on the top shelf of my closet, silly things like receipts printed in French or wristbands, pretty things like my corsage from junior prom or a shell from the pacific coast, random things like the gift ribbons Gabby pasted to my door for my birthday freshman year. All gone.
So what is left to the photographer is the impression of his son’s first birthday, the outlines of a wedding, the arm of a friend. And what was taken was the same feeling of contentment, of continuity, of family that I feel every time I flip though the pages of “Megan Elizabeth, Year 1” and see my boyish father cradling the blob that I once was.
And the whole thing is so immense that once again I can’t fathom it. But I can utterly respect that fact that from those fragments he found something of value and that as he put it, “the images that remain are more dear to me than ever.” It’s the type of endearment that can only arise from staggering loss.