Tangible memories: I wonder if we're starting to disappear.
Not so long ago, I went to stay with my grandmother for a week to take care of her while she recovered from eye surgery. I spent my days in her company; cooking, cleaning, feeding the dogs. Grandma lives in an old house of dust, and when a house is that old, who’s to say how old the dust is in the hard-to-reach places of the house? Living alone in a big house, she fought a losing battle with entropy (I guess we all are to some extent), where messes and miscellaneous items have crept from the socially acceptable wall spaces, encroaching the actual living space. From shelves to the floor. From tabletops to that weird space beside the table legs. It felt like the walls were thicker. More stuff had happened here.
Sorry. I’m not here to talk about the state of my grandmother’s house.
On a hot afternoon one day, I sought refuge indoors. I spotted a bunch of photo albums and cassette tapes on the shelf and felt them calling to me. Not really, I just wanted to see what was inside. The glass door gave (although hesitant) when I pried it open and stood agape as I awkwardly hauled the relics onto the coffee table, as though it could not remember the last time it had been opened. I sat on one of the uncomfortable hardwood benches and flipped through them one by one.
The self-adhesive pages contained moments from papa’s childhood and adolescence, and a few from grandma’s as well. Some of the developed film images were accompanied by brochures, postcards, and ticket stubs. Papa wrote captions beside some of the pictures, and some of the albums even had an index in papa’s handwriting. He still writes the same way. I looked up from the collages and collections of photos and saw the house in a new light. I saw into a time before the entropy and the dust had taken over: a house full of life, with all its joys and sorrows. I could picture papa sitting in his room, reading comics and listening to The Beatles. I imagined him walking into the living room to crack a joke with grandma. I could almost feel the intense love that she had for him- the grief-filled love for an only son who would not see his father again for over a decade. Through these tangible records, I caught a glimpse of what life used to be like here, and I felt a fondness for the nostalgia that wasn’t mine. Second-hand nostalgia, if you will.
This got me thinking about the importance of real, tangible things. Memories that we can physically touch. Books that we can flip through with a fondness, knowing that someone else has touched them, smelled them, and inspected their contents before us. I feel there's an even deeper kind of memory here. The kind of memory that we don’t make so much of anymore, and I wonder if we’re starting to disappear.