This is going to be a bit of an odd post but it is something that has been on my mind. Steel yourself for a rather melancholic romp through my childhood. I have to physically go into the office this morning, and I don’t really have any other content ideas staged so we are going to go with this one. It is also going to be somewhat difficult to write because I want to speak in generalities to protect the innocent. If you have been reading this blog for some time you might know that I grew up in a very small town. The town was so small that it largely did not have much in the way of the infrastructure required to survive from day to day. I live an hour south from the small town that I grew up in, but about twenty minutes west was a medium sized town that we were in constantly because that is where the closest Walmart was, along with various sundry other amenities like the nearest hospital.
Recently I have been spending a good deal of time in this medium sized town because with my father breaking his hip then having a hernia surgery and various assorted doctors visits… have pushed me to drive its streets once again. I would say that honestly this medium sized down holds more memories for me than probably even my home town because we spent so much time there. During the summers I would take part in this Arts Enrichment camp at their performing arts center that is this giant art deco adjacent building. I would spend four or five weeks each year going eight plus hours a day to this camp, some of which was completely unstructured time roaming the facility and in a way it almost feels like a home that I once lived in. Each time I pass the building waves of half remembered memories wash over me and it was one of these that I am going to focus on this morning.
There are so many faces that I remember vividly, but I am awful with names. However in all of these fragmented bits of my databanks, one specific name stood out. I have no clue WHY I specifically remember their name but as one does when you are bored one night… I googled it. Seems as though it is a pretty unique name because everything that I was able to pull up from Google seemed to be linked to this individual. In part this is why I am not using names because I have a feeling that they might just be the only person named this on the internet. Among the links I found was one to an Art Portfolio website that included a contact form. It took me a few days but I finally cobbled together a message that I am certain sounded like the murmurings of a madman and hit send.
A lot of the memories of this time blend together because I went to the Art Camp a number of different times under different disciplines. The first time I attended was in the band program, the second time I think was for traditional art, the third time for photography and the last time was for creative writing. Everything is pretty clear other than those middle two times… not sure which one came first but in any one of these disciplines there are roughly ten to fifteen kids that go along with one or two instructors. The person in question I remember in association with the traditional art program. I remember hanging out with them quite a bit that summer, eating lunches in the same pod of folks and even hanging out at a dance that was associated with the program. I remember them being extremely agitated that night over something but I don’t remember what.
There are certain songs that trigger memories of that dance, namely Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode. I think this is largely because the individual I reached out to, had a friend who was super into Depeche Mode in the Ballet program, and at this dance they kept trying to get whoever was controlling the sound system to play it. I remember the name of the Pottery instructor and that we made Raku which is a kind of pottery where we fired it in a makeshift Kiln that was effectively a trashcan packed with wood and paper… which leads the glaze to crack and the clay to turn black from the soot. I also remember making this nonsense leather mask in the class that was somewhere between Kabuki and Voodoo themed. Each memory is a vignette out of space and time and I’ve sort of woven them into a narrative for lack of other context.
Scanning back forward to today, I thought maybe the Art Portfolio website was unattended and that maybe I was just sending an email out into the void. I set my expectations that I was unlikely to ever hear back from this person, but roughly a day later I had a return response, which lead to a handful of exchanges back and forth. While the recipient was extremely gracious about such a weird interaction, and remembered a number of details about that summer… while they never really said as much I can tell they have no clue at all who I am even when I provided a picture from that era in my life. This person was memorable enough for them to act as an anchor in my memory but whatever recollections they might have had about me were washed away by time. I understand this completely because my parent will dredge up people that I supposedly knew as a child and I cannot with any amount of concentration muster any details about them.
This whole sequence however has had this weird impact on me. It is starting to make me question my own personal narrative about how events in the past went down. Like in this case I remembered hanging out with this person quite a bit in maybe a group of four people total. Maybe I was just the annoying kid that was hanging on trying to find a place to fit in? Maybe I just came across as random white dude number 407 in a sea of other very similar folks that blended into the background radiation? Thinking back I do remember this was likely before my final growth spurt and absolutely before facial hair, and from my high school days onwards the three defining features that people generally recall about me are the beard, being 6’4″ and having a deeper than normal voice. During that summer however, I had none of these on my side.
It does however make me wonder what sort of impression I leave on people now. Am I just a nameless and faceless voice in the chaos of the internet? Am I someone that leaves a mark on those that I have interacted with? I warned you this was going to be a melancholic post, and I don’t really have any answers to these. I am told that I leave a mark on people, but also when confronted with the fact that someone I very clearly remember has zero memory of me… it does sorta make you wonder how tenuous that connection might be.
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