Madeleines

My family moved to southern West Virginia in August of 1980, a week before I started sixth grade. In September of 1987, a college freshman, I moved to the Midwestern region in which I have spent most of the intervening 25 years. I was astounded by its flatness. I cannot remember when the cornfields started to feel like home, cannot remember when I began to expect that streets would be laid out in a tidy grid. It was strange to be back in the mountains, remembering my leap from girl to young woman.

There are no flat streets in the town where we lived, and few straight ones. The roads there follow the mountain contours; they twist and swoop and change their names unpredictably. They made me grateful that I will be teaching my kids to drive in the flatlands.

There are memory grenades in every block: kerpow! --it's the Dunkin' Donuts where we drank coffee late at night. Kerblam! --it's the Wendy's where my dear friend Becky shook pepper in my hair. (Proust wrote about memories and cakelets; I'm all about explosives. That's what four sons will do to you.) Some of those memories I tried, fumblingly, to explain to my husband. Others, like the darkroom kiss that was the benchmark to which I compared kisses for a long time afterward, I kept to myself. "There's the newspaper building," I said as we drove by, remembering not only my crush on the photographer but also the pleasures of laying out our high school newspaper there in the years before Word and Publisher: running articles through the wax machine and sticking them down just so, trimming the border tape with the X-Acto knife I carried to school every day. A person could get expelled for that these days, but in 1986 the media teacher issued X-Acto knives to our entire class and we were expected to keep them handy.

Four of my particular friends were there for the reunion: Angela and JJ, both theater pals, and Chris and Patrick, both newspaper/yearbook pals. For most of high school I had a colossal crush on Patrick, who had green eyes with impossible eyelashes and zero interest in me. For reasons now obscure to me, I used to ask him questions I already knew the answers to in hopes of getting a conversation rolling. The first time we were standing at our lockers. "Patrick," I said, heart pounding, "how many esses are there in 'assassinate'?" Oh, Jamie, you vixen, you.

I tried to take the kids to a movie, only to learn that the movie theater I remembered had been shuttered. It sparked another memory, of a night when I had been given permission, unusually, to see a midnight movie with Chris and Patrick. The midnight movie was canceled, but they ran into an older friend of theirs who sold them three beers there in the parking lot. We went back to Patrick's house because his mother wasn't there. I'm pretty sure I was too much of a straight arrow to drink any beer, but they took a picture of me holding a beer can. (This is yet another moment in which I am grateful there was no Facebook in 1987.) I went home and opened my Bible to the spot where I'd left off the night before in Ephesians. It was my first Bible Zinger experience: "Be not drunk on wine, for this leads to debauchery." I could practically hear the Twilight Zone music.

These days my memory is not what it used to be. The kids are constantly saying, "Hey, Mom, remember that time when [I don't even remember what it is I've forgotten but there are plenty of things that could go in these brackets]." I usually answer, "Ummmmmm?" It was surprising to see how crisp my West Virginia memories remain: what I was wearing (and how I felt about it), where I was sitting in whose car, the feel of a nascent beard on my cheek, a precise tone of voice within a long-ago conversation.

I took the two oldest to see the Theatre West Virginia production of Rocket Boys. It is Homer Hickam's story, and his yearning to get OUT of coal country was particularly resonant for me. I remember how fiercely I wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere far away, and how afraid I was that I would be stuck there.

In 25 years there have been 14 deaths among my classmates, and at least 2 have lifelong disabilities. My husband's graduating class (smaller, but not that much smaller) has only seen 2 or 3 deaths. I am thinking of it as a place that wrings people out while they are young, but I am not, as you may have noticed, impartial about the kind of place it is.

It's strange to think that it used to be the place I knew best. I drove those crazy roads every day; I hardly heard the accent that struck me so forcefully on this visit. (I wanted to ask one of our tour guides if he would run through a little word list for me so I could analyze his liquid vowelization patterns, but I thought it might be a mite disruptive for the other museum visitors.) It is still strange, days later, to think it over here in my cozy yellow house-- how familiar it all was, and how foreign.

Comments

[AmyinMotown]

I will probably have more to say on this, later, but for now I just want to tell you what an amazing, evocative post this is. How IS that, that I can remember so much from my teens and 20s but if you ask me what I did for my 41st birthday (a year and change ago) I couldn't tell you? Not to mention the boys of my youth, and now my own boy is much closer to that age than I am. Beautiful work.

[mary d]

Great post, Jamie. How DO we remember all that stuff? Something there about being a teenager (taking care of only yourself) vs. a mom, taking care of others, I think. Plus the sleep deprivation gets ya every time.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and am now in the flat midwest. The roads! Oh, that part resonates with me. I was home this summer and driving up, down, around, through instead of a nice tidy grid. It came back, like riding a bike, but holy cow, the roads!

[Lilian]

what about the madeleines? I probably missed something.

Yes, this is an amazing and evocative post and I love it. Last Saturday we visited the city and the house where my husband was born and where he spent most vacations -- since it was his maternal grandma's house -- until he was 18, but I had to be on another car with my parents and I wasn't with him when he saw the house. The current owners let him, his parents & my sons in! I imagine it must have been a pretty unique experience. (My mother-in-law also lived in that house from toddlerhood until she left for boarding school and then got married and then she gave birth to my husband, her firstborn, in that very house).

[MrsDarwin]

Lovely, Jamie. I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachins in Southern Virginia -- probably not so far from where you lived -- and although I moved out of Virginia at about the same age you were moving into the area, I still remember with great clarity the landscape and the incidents of that time. I went back a few years ago to see where we used to live. Nothing had changed in twenty years. It was wonderful. I could drive the roads from memory, despite having moved away before I'd learned to drive. I showed my husband and children places I'd talked about and the property where I'd run barefoot through the hay stubble.

You really can go back, if you go on your own terms.

[nancyo]

Oh, the wax machine! A decade earlier I was laying out articles for my college newspaper in Virginia with wax and a t-square. Lovely reminiscences.

[Brad Mills]

James, this was beautiful. Thank you. I share many of the same memories as you, and despite living only an hour away from our old hometown, it seems as foreign to me now as Addis Ababa.