Memories that we carry forward
by Megan Turda
I don’t remember a lot of firsts. It would be too convenient, too romantic. The firsts are tucked away inside me, buried, foundations for the mirages and echoes of what I do remember.
Farmer’s markets with my grandmother on hazy summer mornings, the pillowy feel of cinnamon donuts on the inside of my cheeks. The tingle of saccharine, purple grapes across my tongue, so sweetly overpowering.
Chlorinated waters and salty spray, red peeling skin, too young and stubborn to sit still for sunscreen. Learning to dive deep and blow bubble rings. Summers spent like pennies at The Plunge, Malaga Cove, Peninsula High, PV High. Bomb pops and cheeseburgers gritted with wind-kicked sand. Bee stings and beach towels and searing, sticky leather car seats. Fundamental parts of me blurred together like smudged pastel drawings.
Memory is like that. Fickle and strange. Biased toward negativity for survival. Yet the joy remains. The things that stick are the things repeated, rehearsed like a stage play. But no matter how it seems the same, memory is like a river. How does the old wisdom go? “You can never step in the same river twice. It is not the same river and you are not the same person.” As the infinite reflection of mirrors grow greener through the imperfections of the glass, memory distorts.
But it tells us something about ourselves. The things we take with us and what we leave behind. The parts that seem clearer than others when revisited, and the little lies we tell ourselves. But even if the goggles are rosier, the beauty was always there.
This compounds every time we make new memories in old places. Abalone Cove was a fuzzy, half-remembered trip until it became a favorite of mine. The exhausting hike is bearable with the promise of striped shore crabs and a warm hand in mine. The joyful surprise of long-tailed weasels bounding in the morning mists. Wayfarers Chapel of pop culture renown is just as enchanting in person.
Mole crabs at Rat Beach and fighting past the waves over a carpet of bean clam shells to reach calm waters for a swim. Talking water samples and surveying the shoreline for the Surfrider Foundation. Tiny tree frogs the size of your thumb nail at Madrona Marsh and butterflies the size of your face at the South Bay Botanic Gardens. The little gazebo at Roessler Point and the gentle shush of the waves.
I don’t remember a lot of firsts. At least not the way one might remember them, or claim to, in a memoir. But I do remember. And I think it has something to do with nostalgia. How memory has changed even the meaning of that word. What once meant homesickness for a distant place now means something more difficult to define. A deep seated longing for a time, a memory, an innocence, that has passed. And it’s something like that for me. Less a lamentation of an “innocence lost” and more a curiosity for what’s managed to survive.
The things my mind revisits are not events, in sequence, like a film reel. Not a narrative with distinct beginning and end. They’re feelings. Impressions and sensations. Trips to the beach are marked by the sweet smell of sunscreen, the screech of gulls, the burn of sea spray in my nose, the salt on my lips, the sand that follows me home. The way it feels to laugh with strangers, new friends, the joy of new experience or sharing that old experience with someone new. It has never been the itinerary.
My mind boxes things in categories, not in sequence. At least not for these memories. Like items in a cabinet of curiosity rather than books on a shelf. Roessler Point, for example, lives in my brain, not as a place I’ve gone with friends or family, though it has been such a place. It lives as a platonic ideal, a snapshot framed with honor in a shadow box. When I think of places for first kisses, I think of Roessler Point and its little gazebo. When I think of Rat Beach, my mind summons not one of many excursions I’ve made for a picnic or shell hunt or swimming. I think of Marine Science classes gathered on the shores. Abalone Cove is a crab, nestled in the recesses of memory, overcast mornings that swell and burst into afternoons of discovery. It’s like this for everything.
Obviously the boring parts fall away in memories. Most people don’t remember long waits at theme parks. Only the rides.The brain saves space for what will be by only bringing along fragments of what has been, just the interesting parts. But I think it’s a bit more than that for me.
I’m a homebody by nature. I like the familiar. And in that sense, I think that these memories are, in a way, so foundational, that they’re part of me. Unquestioned and eternal, even taken for granted. They’re all just little parts of a tapestry of “home.” Threads interwoven so tightly that following each one would be an impossibility even without the trappings and pitfalls of the human memory.
But even routine, mundane things live like this, beyond their demise, in memory. The Plaza Mayor Starbucks of my teen and young adult years, now, only exists in photographs. It’s a place I spent countless hours with friends after school. With family on summer afternoons. I’ve written paragraphs of essays for college and more for my own amusement parked by the windows with a frappuccino in hand. It’s forever tied to the memory of one of the few firsts that stuck, wholly and completely, as the first meeting place for myself and an online friend. And as commercial and fleeting as it was, it’s always going to be there. It’s the place that comes to mind when I hear the words “coffee shop.” It’s the place I think of and smile when I remember the day spent with that friend. It’s the quintessential place I think of when I think of friends and good times. And it exists now, only and forever, as a memory.
It’s strange to think of this sort of thing as sad or bittersweet. To think of it as the word nostalgia was originally intended. Because even if I can’t go back, I will go forward, carrying it with me. It will be with me when I read lines of poetry at the open mic nights at the Coffee Cartel, it will be with me when I meet up with old school friends at Peet’s Coffee. It will be there with memories of Borders bookstore, and the forgotten coffee shop where I first tasted balsamic fig and mascarpone ice cream. The place persists in my mental map, like phantom limb pain, but for a building.
And we all live this way, carrying these little things forward with us. That’s as far from bittersweet as I can imagine. It’s triumphant. Times change, even memories change, people change. Despite it all, we carry pieces of the past forward, even if they slowly become unrecognizable. We carry them because they are part of us. Our stories. They may not be preserved perfectly, in photograph or in memory. But they are remembered, and the echoes transcend, even when the words are lost in the reverberations.
They are part of me. Part of some of you, too. And that’s anything but nostalgic. It’s warm, comfortable and sweet. Golden summers of old that season our current moments and shine light on the joys of today. ER
