Connections: Looking Back . . . and Forward
This appropriately hazy image of the view out of the kitchen door of my childhood home—the backyard’s azaleas and the oak trees beyond, framed by the railing, posts, and hanging plants of the side porch—is the cover photo of my brother’s book about growing up in Covington.
Since my last post, I had the opportunity to return to Covington, Louisiana, the place where I grew up. I traveled there for business as well as the opportunity to celebrate the April birthdays of three of my siblings. The dominant event was my brother’s party, marking his 65th birthday. 2018 is a big year for milestone birthdays among my brothers and sisters. To avoid incurring wrath, suffice it to say that one will reach 80 this summer, another 75 in September, and another has already attained the comparatively youthful age of 60.
My birthday was earlier in the year. My daughter, Abbie, organized a wonderful present for me. She asked her sisters, my siblings, and close friends to write to me and tell the story of a memory or memories that I shared with them. She printed all of the replies, put them in envelopes marked with the writers’ names, and placed them in a shadow box. I was overwhelmed! My brother Peter was recovering from surgery so he took the time to write about 20 pages of narrative filled with remembrances of our childhood.
Peter’s words accomplish what all great writing attains—transcendence—as he carries the reader beyond the ordinary descriptions of a house and a town to the real places of our home and our Covington. His introduction describes his purpose:
Take a walk with me. A Proustian search of a lost time. Proust said, “People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success.” I will attempt this hazardous pilgrimage with Chris and his family and bring you into the rooms and gardens of his youth so that you can appreciate a little better his search for lost time. We will meet just a few of the characters that moved about the stage of Covington and intersected young Chris’ life, family, and school.
Peter achieved his goal. I would have to quote the entire manuscript to fully convey how well he captured the Covington of the 1960s and the rambling wooden home that sheltered the younger 5/9ths of my clan as we grew up and left. Our neighborhood comes alive again as he depicts its peculiar characters, colorful eccentrics, and the scads of children of large families who spent days outside—playing and yelling and running. I will have to be satisfied with another quote that suggests the spirit of Peter’s writing:
The hot and sticky Louisiana nights were filled with the chirping of crickets and frogs and the sound of kick the can games under the corner streetlight. If you sat on the side porch off the kitchen on the old white Naugahyde sofa from Broadway, you could hear neighborhood dogs barking at the night sounds and watch the fireflies flicker in and out of the azaleas. The kitchen stove was right next to the screen door, so if you were lucky, the smell of that night’s casserole would be mixed with the outside night smells amid the rattlings of dinner preparation and Mama’s muffled conversation from the kitchen. Daddy would be waiting impatiently at the dining room table, drink at hand, waiting for Mama to come pick up her gin hand and finish their game before dinner.
As evocative as that quote is, it does not include Peter’s wonderful details of the personalities that were our neighbors or his block-to-block descriptions of our corner of Covington. What a gift!
For the occasion of Peter’s birthday, I tried to pay it forward by publishing his work. I formatted his manuscript and added photos of the people and places he described. So images of all of my siblings, my mother and father, the rooms where our memories dwell, the porches and yard of our outside lives, and the oak-lined streets of Covington are included in a bound book of Peter’s words. The cover image is shown above. It is an appropriately hazy image of the view through the kitchen door of my childhood home—the backyard’s azaleas and the oak trees beyond, framed by the railing and posts of the side porch. It is a view of the past that invites readers to absorb Peter’s words. I entitled the book, but the title’s words are not mine. It comes from Peter’s introduction. Read again the first quote above. Aren’t we all on that search?
Peter concluded by laying out the reason for such a search:
Walker Percy wrote that the understanding of one’s own life is a large enough task and a more important one than attempting the impossible understanding of the universe. To make an existential grasp of life, we must want to feel every piece of time. Sometimes we are unsuspecting pilgrims, launched on these journeys, as Proust said, “in a series of incidents of unconscious memory,” whether through a madeleine cake and the smell of a cup of tea, or a roast, rice and gravy dinner, “… we come to realize that all the beauty we have experienced in the past is alive.”
While I was in Covington I was fortunate to also experience the alive beauty of the present that connects the past to the future.
Peter’s daughter Katie helped her seven-year-old daughter Lily put together a memory box that contained photos, drawings, and knick-knacks and souvenirs of important events in Lily’s young life. The box will be put away and brought out in ten years for Lily to see and experience once again her girlhood at a time when she will stand at the edge of her future as a young adult completing high school.
The artifacts will call forth memories as will the treasure of words written in 2018 to be read in 2028. For the box also contains letters written by her grandparents, parents, and other relatives. The letters portray the person Lily is now and contain passionate hopes for who she will become. Another gift! Congrats to Lily’s teacher who came up with this terrific idea of preserving the present for the future. In 2028 my grandniece and her family will cherish such a creative way of looking forward by remembering her past.