get it before its gone
Wow. A month has passed and look how many letters I have written. It shows just how good I am at writing to people. Nice one, CJ. So I am home now. Back in my parents house - our little suburban street - oak branches hanging over the sidewalk. And as much as I want to say that "being back" feels so jarring and different, I can't help but notice how normal - how ordinary it feels. Its like nothing has changed. My little brother (7 now) still wants to play baseball every free minute he has (more of a mans man than I will ever be), my dad still starts his day at 3pm and ends at 6 am, and my step mom (marj) still sacrifices much desired trips to whole foods because they don't carry that certain brand of fruitsnacks or juices that my brother and dad like. There are so many little things - the sight of soggy cookie crisp in the sink, left in the wake of my brother's early morning dash to summer camp or school; the sounds of creeky floorboards and flushing toilets as my dad shuffles around upstairs in the wee hours of the morning ; the way the tile floor of his bathroom ("office") is always covered in books and prolific scrawlings and scribblings of genius on yellow legal pads; i'll come up to bring him a drink and he'll look up from his writing and, suddenly thumbing through a book at his side, say "hey Ceej I have something I think you should take a look at - so many little things like this that I missed about home. But they are the type of things, so little, so ordinary, that you don't know you missed them until you finally return and are like "oh yeah...i remember this."
I thought it was going to be heartbreaking. I imagined that I would spend weeks in mourning over the fact that I was no longer in cape town. I imagined that I would go back to mundane routines - getting dressed for work, heading into the loop on the L, and somewhere within these routines, most likely on the walk from my house to the L stop, I would fantasize that I was back in Cape Town. I would pick a stretch of the walk - say the sidewalk between here and the end of the block - and close my eyes, imagining the whole time that I was back in mowbray, doing the walk up from bollihope (our real-worldesque house of americans) to the UCT campus - down cecil road and past the fields and around that dusty corner. I imagined that after locking up my house for the night in chicago, I would lean against the door frame to my room and picture I was back in bollihope, in the doorway of Brooklyn's room - "tell me the best part of your day." I imagined that I would turn the boring walk from the adams L stop to my office into that sweetly familiar trek down to rondeboch to checkers because they carried dried mangos and coconut milk. In my head I would fantasize about hearing the minibusses scream by, honking, the caller leaning half out the window "wynberg...wynberg" "caaype tee-yown."
But for some reason none of that has really happened yet. Maybe it just hasn't hit me. Maybe it never will. Its like being at some meaningful event - a memorial service for a recently deceased faculty member at your school, a 911 commemoration and feeling so strongly that, given the moment, you should be crying. But you don't feel it. You don't feel like crying. And the nearest emotion to you is guilt - for not being sensitive enough to cry at a time like this.
The feeling that I do feel is just "blahh" - like waiting for a bus. Nothing spectacular. No extremes. If someone were to ask you how you were feeling at that exact moment, you would, by default, having nothing better to say, respond: "im fine, how are you." Everything is so familiar in fact that it is easy to forget that the last 5 months ever happened. And I would never want to forget something like that. I think it must be a defense mechanism. You move on real quick, get new priorities, box up and store away old memories so you too save yourself the sadness of coming to grips emotionally with something that for all intents and purposes is OVER. Has PASSED. (and therefore) Is PAST.
So what is left is a strange strange feeling of brooding panic. Like the entire 5 month experience in Cape Town is disappearing - evaporating before my very eyes - like in the oh-so-common movie trope of someone (usually just dead) disappearing in front of their loved one - like Patric Swayze fading into "the light" as Demi Moore waves goodbye. Cape Town is giving me that slow wave and, looking up over its shoulder, as if it is being summoned by the beyond, and whispers to me, in that deliciously melodramatic way, "looks like I have to go now..."
So, like something rapidly turning into a ghost I find myself frantically trying to materialize cape town. Trying to bottle the experience up - preserve it for later. From zippers, pants pockets, wallets I am pulling scraps of paper, wrappers, matchbooks - anything I can find loosley related to any memory in capetown. I have this big plan to put them into a scrap book. I have other plans like filling the rest of my cape town journal and printing all my digital pictures, and making this blog incredible. But it just strikes me that all these plans derive from one single silly belief: that the memory of cape town can be preserved - kept from disintegrating by saving little scraps of receipts and ticket stubs and pressing them between plastic pages. In the search for memorabilia it just struck me how silly it was that I was taking these things - that I would normally consider to be trash - and trying so so desperately to assign a meaning to them. Usually the meaning or memory that I staple to the object has very little to do with where and what circumstance the object actually came from.
I am left wondering why we must collect, why me must pin down - how we turn memories into objects because we think that makes them more real - gives them a longer shelf life. We gather the scraps intending to turn them into a scrap book. And more often than not we move on to something new and more pressing before we can finish our pressing. And maybe 4 years later, on your way off to some vacation or far off destination, you pull out an old suitcase - and upon discovering a forgotten pocket - you stumble upon a handful of receipts and business cards that you barley recognize. Things you saved from the trash because you packed them full of memories that now you are grasping - straining as your mind reaches - trying to remember what the hell "Madame Zingara's" was. A restaurant, you think, Maybe you ate there. You wish you had put it in a scrap book. Then you could just read the note and remember.
Funny huh? That what this blog is: an attempt to make a memory into something a little more lasting -a place to put the scraps.
I thought it was going to be heartbreaking. I imagined that I would spend weeks in mourning over the fact that I was no longer in cape town. I imagined that I would go back to mundane routines - getting dressed for work, heading into the loop on the L, and somewhere within these routines, most likely on the walk from my house to the L stop, I would fantasize that I was back in Cape Town. I would pick a stretch of the walk - say the sidewalk between here and the end of the block - and close my eyes, imagining the whole time that I was back in mowbray, doing the walk up from bollihope (our real-worldesque house of americans) to the UCT campus - down cecil road and past the fields and around that dusty corner. I imagined that after locking up my house for the night in chicago, I would lean against the door frame to my room and picture I was back in bollihope, in the doorway of Brooklyn's room - "tell me the best part of your day." I imagined that I would turn the boring walk from the adams L stop to my office into that sweetly familiar trek down to rondeboch to checkers because they carried dried mangos and coconut milk. In my head I would fantasize about hearing the minibusses scream by, honking, the caller leaning half out the window "wynberg...wynberg" "caaype tee-yown."
But for some reason none of that has really happened yet. Maybe it just hasn't hit me. Maybe it never will. Its like being at some meaningful event - a memorial service for a recently deceased faculty member at your school, a 911 commemoration and feeling so strongly that, given the moment, you should be crying. But you don't feel it. You don't feel like crying. And the nearest emotion to you is guilt - for not being sensitive enough to cry at a time like this.
The feeling that I do feel is just "blahh" - like waiting for a bus. Nothing spectacular. No extremes. If someone were to ask you how you were feeling at that exact moment, you would, by default, having nothing better to say, respond: "im fine, how are you." Everything is so familiar in fact that it is easy to forget that the last 5 months ever happened. And I would never want to forget something like that. I think it must be a defense mechanism. You move on real quick, get new priorities, box up and store away old memories so you too save yourself the sadness of coming to grips emotionally with something that for all intents and purposes is OVER. Has PASSED. (and therefore) Is PAST.
So what is left is a strange strange feeling of brooding panic. Like the entire 5 month experience in Cape Town is disappearing - evaporating before my very eyes - like in the oh-so-common movie trope of someone (usually just dead) disappearing in front of their loved one - like Patric Swayze fading into "the light" as Demi Moore waves goodbye. Cape Town is giving me that slow wave and, looking up over its shoulder, as if it is being summoned by the beyond, and whispers to me, in that deliciously melodramatic way, "looks like I have to go now..."
So, like something rapidly turning into a ghost I find myself frantically trying to materialize cape town. Trying to bottle the experience up - preserve it for later. From zippers, pants pockets, wallets I am pulling scraps of paper, wrappers, matchbooks - anything I can find loosley related to any memory in capetown. I have this big plan to put them into a scrap book. I have other plans like filling the rest of my cape town journal and printing all my digital pictures, and making this blog incredible. But it just strikes me that all these plans derive from one single silly belief: that the memory of cape town can be preserved - kept from disintegrating by saving little scraps of receipts and ticket stubs and pressing them between plastic pages. In the search for memorabilia it just struck me how silly it was that I was taking these things - that I would normally consider to be trash - and trying so so desperately to assign a meaning to them. Usually the meaning or memory that I staple to the object has very little to do with where and what circumstance the object actually came from.
I am left wondering why we must collect, why me must pin down - how we turn memories into objects because we think that makes them more real - gives them a longer shelf life. We gather the scraps intending to turn them into a scrap book. And more often than not we move on to something new and more pressing before we can finish our pressing. And maybe 4 years later, on your way off to some vacation or far off destination, you pull out an old suitcase - and upon discovering a forgotten pocket - you stumble upon a handful of receipts and business cards that you barley recognize. Things you saved from the trash because you packed them full of memories that now you are grasping - straining as your mind reaches - trying to remember what the hell "Madame Zingara's" was. A restaurant, you think, Maybe you ate there. You wish you had put it in a scrap book. Then you could just read the note and remember.
Funny huh? That what this blog is: an attempt to make a memory into something a little more lasting -a place to put the scraps.
posted by CJ Hunt | 10:58 PM
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