Freedom

by

Jonathan Franzen

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2010.

Available in hardcover, CD, digital audio, and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Author Jonathan Franzen, an avid birder, has trained his binoculars here on a different species: Homo sapiens. While he does deal extensively with our fine feathered friends in his new novel Freedom, people are his focus. Cataloging the behavior of humans in their natural habitat has become his specialty. And one of the devices he uses in this book is memoir for the voice of a character named Patty Berglund.

Franzen published The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, in 2007 prior to writing this novel. I asked him about the effect of the proximity of these two works when he stopped in Austin, Texas, on September 17 during his Freedom book tour around the country.

“Did writing your own memoir so recently perhaps influence your choice of that format for Patty’s voice in Freedom?”

“Maybe,” he replied, after a thoughtful pause in the question-and-answer session at BookPeople.“That’s an original question, one of the most original I’ve had in a while. So ‘Maybe’ is a sloppy answer to a really great question. I’ll have to think about that.”

Franzen employs the question-and-answer format to good effect in Freedom when a teenage boy hoping to impress a girl with an online post interviews a rock-star character named Richard Katz. Richard’s personality shines through in that five-page exchange far better than if the two characters had been merely conversing.

Within the Q&A interview, Franzen also embeds an editorial about rock and roll, revolutions, Apple Computers, antiwar movements, and Republicans via Richard’s answers.

Franzen presents Patty Berglund’s two-part memoir as an autobiography: “’MISTAKES WERE MADE: Autobiography of Patty Berglund’ by Patty Berglund (Composed at Her Therapist’s Suggestion).” The first portion near the novel’s beginning has three chapters: “Agreeable,” “Best Friends,” and “Free Markets Foster Competition.”

Patty starts out by thanking various coaches and teachers who trained her as an athlete, which “helped make up for her morbid competitiveness and low self-esteem.” Next she describes her family, blending facts with feelings: “Patty grew up in Westchester County, New York. She was the oldest of four children, the other three of whom were more like what her parents had been hoping for. She was notably Larger than everybody else, also Less Unusual, also measurably Dumber. Not actually dumb but relatively dumber.” Her height affords her not only the ability to be a basketball star but also an insight: She “was never going to fit into the family anyway.”

Patty offers asides as judgments about earlier actions seen through the lens of years as she ponders the events of her life. She footnotes later thoughts with asterisks: “It occurred to Patty…that maybe the reason….Not that there was anything she could have done about it.” And in another place: “But she needed a modicum of time and breathing space, and even taking into account her youth and inexperience the autobiographer is embarrassed to report that her means of buying this time and space was to bring the conversation around, perversely, to….”

She analyzes: “Few circumstances have turned out to be more painful to the autobiographer, in the long run, than….” And later: “Where did the self-pity come from?…The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.” (The concept of freedom is viewed from many angles all throughout Freedom.)

Patty utilizes a pro-and-con debate format within her memoir as if putting herself on trial, weighing the morality of one of her actions — and in the process her entire marriage:

“For the defense: Patty had tried, at the outset, to warn….

For the prosecution: ….Patty was the one….

For the defense: But she was trying to be good…!

For the prosecution: Her motives were bad….

For the defense: She loved her kids!

For the prosecution: ….She knew what she was doing and she didn’t stop….trapped in a housewife’s life….

For the defense: ….It wasn’t her fault….

For the prosecution: It was her fault….

For the defense: But she didn’t know that! She thought she was doing the right thing by giving her kids the attention and the love her own parents hadn’t given her.

For the prosecution: She did know it, because Walter told her, and told her, and told her.

For the defense:  ….She thought she had to…be the good cop because Walter was the bad cop.

For the prosecution: ….The problem was between Patty and Walter, and she knew it.

For the defense: She loves Walter!

For the prosecution: The evidence suggests otherwise.

For the defense: Well, in that case, Walter doesn’t love her, either. He doesn’t love the real her. He loves some wrong idea of her.

For the prosecution: That would be convenient if only it were true….

For the defense: It isn’t fair to say she doesn’t love him!

For the prosecution: If she can’t behave herself, it doesn’t matter if she loves him.”

Patty blames, even attempting to palm off her guilt over an affair on Leo Tolstoy as she reads War and Peace:  “The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn’t reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov….”

As she puts her life onto paper, Patty works out her emotions through such comments as: “Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.” In some paragraphs, Patty approaches eloquence — as can happen when writing through pain and veering toward honest emotion.

This review will be continued on Monday, September 27, 2010. Lanie will reveal more about her encounter with the author during a book reading in Austin, TX. You won’t want to miss it.

Please leave comments if you have read the book or other reviews, interviews, etc., and have any reactions to share. Lanie and I have both been thinking about how memoir and fiction differ these days and why even novelists (Kathryn Stockett and Bo Caldwell) seem to be drawn to memoir using a variation of a play-within-a play. What are your own thoughts about if and why  this is happening in contemporary literature?

When Stuart and I saw Toy Story 3, I remembered one of our more delightful experiences while in Prague last year–a trip to the Toy Museum at the base of the huge castle in Prague, Czech Republic.

At the time we visited, the museum displayed an amazing collection of Barbie dolls in honor of her 50th anniversary.

Lanie Tankard, in her essay on touchstones published here, said,”The adult is always searching for the child still within, as well as reminders that the person’s own adult children were actually smaller at one time.”

Toy Story 3 overflows with touchstones, or “luminous particulars” that will take you back to your own childhood or to your time of parenting young children, or both. It also evokes deep, universal themes of love v. fear, home v. homelessness, belonging and separation. The animation is so good, you will forget you are watching animation.

Click on the link in the paragraph above for a series of movie trailers that will give you a partial glimpse of these touchstones. Toys in general are great carriers of childhood memory–especially classic toys, like the telephone on a string (I remember this one from my little sister’s toybox as well as our own) to toys of a given era such as astronauts or robots. They carry first impressions of love, which, like all first experiences, go deep into the psyche.

If you have not yet seen this movie, I urge you to go. If you have some kids handy–your own, your neighbor’s, your grandchild, your nephew or neice, take them with you. If you have already seen the movie (or Toy Story I, or II), please tell us your thoughts! What nostalgia floodgates did the film open for you? What insight did you gain? Do you think you could construct a memoir on toys alone?

 

Lanie Tankard is back! This time she has read and reviewed a memoir that challenges the boundaries of the genre–and in the process tells a life story (indirectly). I think you will find her review fascinating.  I know she would love your comment, no matter what you think.  Anyone teaching the genre, and brave souls who are open to a critique in the midst of writing a memoir, ought to read this book.

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir  

by Ander Monson

 Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, April 2010 (208 pp., paperback)

Ander Monson jump starts your brain’s synapses with different connections in his new nonmemoir, Vanishing Point. He observes society. He muses. He sprinkles in a few personal experiences. And he does his edgy best to ignore the self in a genre that is nothing but.  He forces the reader to consider memoir in a creative new light.

Monson has also written a book of essays, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, and a book of stories, Other Electricities, which appear on his website: http://otherelectricities.com/.

In Vanishing Point, Monson has pulled together eighteen essays. Because some were previously published as stand-alone pieces, the volume bears a certain lack of coherence throughout, a few glitches in segue. Even so, this postmodern book kept me mostly riveted during the entirety of a nonstop evening flight from San Jose to Austin. And besides, isn’t that actually how we think, with one thought springing off another all the time — veering askew of the main idea with which we began and funneling our paths through labyrinthine conduits to a meetup in the nethermost region of our minds?

Because Monson perused close to one hundred memoirs to analyze the field, I thought the 100 Memoirs website would be an appropriate venue for reviewing the result. His list of eighty-three at the end of Vanishing Point includes some excellent reads.

He asks valid questions: Are we being obliterated by information? He compares journalism (verifiable truth) and memoir, discusses individualism and collectivism, looks at memory prevention drugs like Versed in surgery, examines the reliability of eyewitness testimony, delves into fact checking for family history, considers the rerouting of synapses in false memories, and compares fiction and nonfiction. He visits respected sources, although full citations do not appear in the book. The protagonist in this masterful chronicle is memory.

The author offers many strong points to consider, such as: “When technique becomes popular fashion, it becomes overused. Its special qualities fall away. All that remains is fad.”

Monson says that he is trying to find the courage NOT to tell his story. And yet, he also parses events in his own life — moving, death, jury duty, eating. Instead of merely stating that he is moving, he thinks about what leaving a city means. He compares floppy disks and the tenure of a book to our life spans: “Thinking about the memoir, or our lives at all, is thinking about death, about technology, about how obsolete we all are soon to become….”

Does Monson’s book succeed in defying classification? He appears to me to have written a memoir despite his best efforts to avoid doing so. Is Vanishing Point possibly a memoir about memoir? The author certainly evinces a strong resistance to the category. The subtitle is “Not a Memoir,” yet at several points in the book Monson refers to it as “this memoir.” Hmmm, perhaps memoir just sneaks up on you when you least expect it?

At the same time, the author has psychoanalyzed the field in a highly engaging philosophical treatise. He weighs the frame narrative in terms of presenting the truth, and ponders framing the future in terms of the past. He casts memoir as map. He comments that “with GPS, the whole idea of being lost is now entirely quaint.” Monson mulls over memoir as palimpsest, wonders whether the self is a wiki, steps outside of himself to observe the ubiquitous use of free wireless at places such as Panera Bread: “Earbuds are in, so we are partly in our inner space.” At times, he reminded me of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. http://bit.ly/5aEmK9

What is a page? Monson decides to find out. He plays with layout and margins.  He trims the sides off letters. He repeats the word me across an entire page, saying “I am putting the me back in memoir for you.” He examines “all that protects us from white space.” He seeks meaning everywhere, wanting to “leave some Borges behind the wall…something visionary and meaningful.” He digresses on self-Googling. He wonders whether communicating with old friends via social media is forcing us into being our old selves again. He believes that the rise of memoir coincided with the rise of role-playing games, and casts memoirists as gamers — role playing, battling conditions, and triumphing. He has some thoughtful turns of phrase: “your fellow Internetters” and “tiny fingerlings” for small potatoes.

And yet he tries so hard not to write memoir that occasionally (to use one of his own statements) he “makes me want to hit him with a rolled up REM/Losing My Religion poster.”

I recommend Vanishing Point to any open-minded reader interested in memoir as a broad playing field. Monson posits, “It’s likely that we are not as individual as we would like to think” and offers solid food for thought on that idea.

            Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas.

My friend and occasional guest blogger Lanie Tankard has written a stellar review of Jeannette Walls’ new book. One of the interesting things she ponders in the review is Walls’ choice of the label true-life novel. Those of you who have weighed in on the issue of memoir versus novel when the author is using imagination to fill in gaps will have a new option to consider.

Lanie’s review appears at Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler’s wonderful and helpful WomensMemoir blog, which is listed in my blog roll (and is where I contributed a review of Rhoda Janzen’s use of humor in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress).

A question to readers: do you like referrals like these? I am aiming for a mix of types of blog posts: my own reviews, some mini-memoir from my own life, referrals to other reviews, referrals to memoir-related news stories, course syllabi and workshop sharing, writing and marketing tips, top-ten lists of memoir suggestions, and guest blogs doing any of the above. Is this too much variety? Is there anything on this list you want more of? When I asked this question about a year ago, some people said they enjoyed the personal mini-memoirs the most. Others like the book reviews. Others the variety. Would love to have your thoughts.

Below find a delightful story with a great twist ending. Guest blogger Lanie Tankard, freelance writer and editor from Austin, TX,  is back again! Lanie took a Writing with Heart class from Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett, who presented an excellent workshop in Austin, Texas, on February 5, 2010, preceding the Story Circle Network national lifewriting conference. Butler & Bonnett’s website is a marvelous resource for memoir writers. The workshop Lanie took was the debut for Writing Alchemy, a technique they will detail in a forthcoming book. They are also offering a new course with the same title. Butler and Bonnett have just started to blog about Writing Alchemy on their website and currently are posting a series of five-minute audios, each with a writing tip from a well-known author. Check out their Women’s Memoirs Facebook page and their newly created Writing Alchemy Facebook page. In their workshop, Butler & Bonnett presented five easy steps to writing with emotion, energy, and color. Lanie arrived with only two words in her mind: “Uncle Joe.” The following memoir vignette is what emerged.

 Uncle Joe from Brooklyn

By Lanie Tankard

“I do know of these

that therefore only are reputed wise

for saying nothing.”

 —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

 Uncle Joe was always smiling. I smiled, too, every time I saw him. He was so goofy looking that he brought out the glee in me. His ears sprang almost straight sideways from his head. His expression never seemed to change — that “glass half full” penetrating gaze was hurled out upon the world as if from his very core. A person felt almost naked as he looked at you.

I was just a little kid when he came to live with us in Cleveland. He seemed ageless to me then. When I think back upon that time now though, I can see that his demeanor probably bespoke a man in his 40s. Short of stature, hair of brown, he had no visible means of support, no wife or offspring, and no discernible activities of which to speak — except sitting on our front porch practically every day.

His was a life devoid of attachments. Uncle Joe had his quirks, and perhaps that was what had kept him a loner. His welcoming appearance was rendered odd when combined with his taciturn manner of interacting with people. And he never seemed to need much of the basics: water, food, or sleep. For all intents and purposes, he was a self-actualized individual who had, by some mysterious invisible means, moved beyond the hierarchy of basic needs.

“Hey, Uncle Joe!” I’d call to him on a summer’s day, as he’d sit in the chair by the peony bush at the far end of the porch. “Dad said the lawn needs watering. Wanna help?”

The strong silent type wouldn’t reply. I never expected him to. So I’d move the conversation along. If my friends were busy, I could always sit out there and talk to Uncle Joe. He was a great listener.

“I’ll just go ahead and get the hose out for us, okay?” I’d continue, marching down the red brick steps of our house on Selwyn Road. I’d uncoil the hose and bring it over so we could moisten a lawn that was the size of a postage stamp.

“Mom!” I’d call. “Would you please help Uncle Joe down the steps?”

I could usually hear the sounds of a baseball game on the new television set drifting through the open screen door. After all, this was the summer of 1954, when the Cleveland Indians were already well on their way to a record-breaking 111 wins, for which they’d capture the American League Pennant. And my mother was one of the Tribe’s biggest fans, unaware at that point that they’d lose every single game (only four!) to the New York Giants in the World Series later that fall.

Most of the team drove fancy cars, and my father worked as a service manager for both Cadillac and Pontiac during the years we lived in Cleveland. The ball players liked my easygoing Dad, and would often give him free game tickets when they’d leave their cars to be serviced. So our family practically lived at the baseball stadium.

All of this meant that my mother would be glued to the TV for a while longer though, while she ironed Dad’s shirts—and even his white handkerchiefs. She spent a lot of time at that ironing board. So did a large number of her contemporaries back in the Fifties, until their irons ran out of steam in the late Sixties and early Seventies. After Sears rolled out those Perma-Prest fabrics and Women’s Lib started to make a lot of sense, ironing boards began to vanish. But not quite yet. It was still 1954, and there she was, ironing my father’s shirts.

I’d look at Uncle Joe and sigh. I knew Mom wouldn’t be coming out until after Larry Doby had finished his turn at bat.

“C’mon, I’ll help you up from the chair,” I’d mutter, knowing my six-year-old arms couldn’t get him beyond standing upright. Hoo boy, was he ever heavy! And sometimes his knees would give out because they got stiff. That usually happened on rainy days.

When Mom finally emerged, she would help him down the steps so he could stand in the front yard with the hose in his hand. Then she and I would head inside to fix some cinnamon toast fingers for me to munch on.

Neighbors would often ask who that was they’d seen watering our grass, since he kept to himself most of the time. We’d just tell them it was Uncle Joe from Brooklyn. He never spoke of his past, so we figured that was a likely spot.

Dad used to give Uncle Joe some of his clothes. And sometimes I’d let him borrow my straw hat. He really liked to wear hats.

My older sister, Roberta, would screech every time she came home from a date because she never knew where Uncle Joe would be hiding. I personally think my parents assigned that watch to him because they just didn’t want to stay up late. Nevertheless, he seemed to relish his post. Sometimes he’d be standing at the front screen door. Other times you could see his eyes peeping out the front window, the Venetian blinds propped open by his bulbous nose. Once he was even sitting in a wicker chair right out on the porch at midnight.

Roberta never knew where he’d be. If she’d been out with a guy she liked, she’d come in all upset at our parents for Uncle Joe being there. But if she’d been on a blind date with a guy she didn’t want to hang around with afterward, then she’d be really grateful Uncle Joe was there. She could say to her date, “Uh oh, I better get in. My uncle’s watching us.”

We moved to Alabama two years later. Uncle Joe came with us. Guess he didn’t have any other place to go. He’d definitely worked his way into our family by then. And if you ask me, he could always spot a free ride. So there we were, headed across the Mason-Dixon Line together. Uncle Joe followed us in the moving truck.  Dad drove our car and Mom routed us on the map. Of course, we had to keep stopping for new maps, as I had a tendency toward motion sickness and Mom usually had one in her hand when I’d lean over the seat with that funny look on my face.

Roberta had just graduated from college and she accompanied us on the drive to L.A. — Lower Alabama. Then she was headed West to live in a different L.A. — Los Angeles. She did her best to keep the new set of brown Samsonite luggage she’d gotten for graduation over on her side of the back seat — well out of range of my waves of nausea. I tried to tune out the whole lot of them with some guy singing about a hound dog on my little transistor radio.

My father had recently retired from working on cars. In fact, Pontiac Motors was where he’d first encountered Uncle Joe. Dad noticed him sitting right there in the showroom cars, just as big as you please — day after day after day — like he owned the place. Uncle Joe didn’t want to buy a car, or even go for a test drive. He just wanted to sit there. The dealership manager was ready to kick him out because Uncle Joe really looked like a seedy character back then. But Dad spoke up and offered to give him a home. The manager was so glad to get him out of the place that he readily agreed. By the time we headed South, Dad and Uncle Joe had bonded.

Uncle Joe got into some of his shenanigans again in Alabama, but nothing like the ones in Cleveland. Maybe all of us were getting older and losing our sense of humor. Roberta was in California. Mom had put away her ironing board and found her True Self, creating a thriving business making artistic sand bottles with all the colors Baldwin County had waiting for her to dig up. Dad kept busy puttering at his workbench, making and repairing everything in sight. And when I wasn’t in school, I was usually down at Wolf Bay or Gulf Shores with my pals.

Maybe Uncle Joe felt neglected. He was certainly looking weaker and weaker. I remember the last time we were together, when I had come home from college during a break. I kind of avoided him then. You know how teenagers are. When I saw him sitting on a trunk in the carport almost doubled over, I made a beeline back inside. I think he finally just plain wore out from neglect.

I miss him. He was like a member of our family in a peripheral way, and a big part of my growing up years. My mother played out her impish sense of humor in all his escapades. Roberta and I would join in until the three of us were laughing so hard we’d have tears coming. My father would just shake his head, chuckling when he’d come home and find Uncle Joe standing there in the driveway wearing an apron and holding a tray of cookies. He liked Uncle Joe a lot.

Uncle Joe represents a time and a place long gone except in my memory — a carefree Cleveland childhood on a street where all the kids on the block played together. He remains an icon for me still, symbolizing a shared family joke that united us all together. I’m so grateful that Dad rescued Uncle Joe. My youth simply wouldn’t have been the same without that ol’ wooden showroom dummy.

©2010 by Elaine F. Tankard.

All Rights Reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission.

The Help spent 379 days in the Amazon Top 100 list. It has 1,751 reviews on Amazon.com and rates 4.5 stars. It is a novel, but, as Lanie Tankard argues, it deserves consideration from a memoir perspective.

 

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

New York: Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam), 2009.

Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, CD, and Kindle editions.

Movie in the works.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

The Help is a testament to the power of memoir, even though it is a novel. It’s actually a book about writing a book — a metabook. And the writing is clear and pure and true.

Kathryn Stockett has created powerful voices for three main characters, and alternates them in chapters much like Barbara Kingsolver did to great effect in THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. The reader is thus privy to different views of the events as the lives of the characters intertwine.

The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement of the Sixties, and eloquently illustrates the boundaries between the help and their employers. This wise book captures a time period important in our history as a country. Even the cover is brilliant both in color and design, and is a subtle portrayal of the book’s theme.

The Help captures the edge — that space between marginalized peoples and those in power by virtue of skin color, gender, age, wealth, heritage, wedding ring, beauty, or Junior League membership.

As a young woman of the privileged class begins to collect stories of the help to publish in a book, the activity changes them all. The maids without power begin to find strength through the telling of their stories, although they fear for their lives. Even the writer’s life is changed while collecting these stories as she begins to view her town through the eyes of the maids.

The simple act of putting down on paper the events of one’s life is empowering. The Help gives pause for thought and should foster deep discussions about prejudice of all types. The book is rich with insight for writers of memoir.

The six-word memoir contest ended at 5 p.m. today. There were 28 entries, three of which were posted on Facebook  and added into the comments section of the original post by me. Click here if you want to see all 28.

I have selected the entry of Chin Pheng Oh “Watching her grow, I see myself” as the grand-prize winner of the contest. She tugged at my mother’s heart. Parents learn so much about themselves from their children. Chin explains one reason for this–as adults we are able to stand outside and observe closely our child instead of staying inside as a child sees himself or herself.

I found five entries worthy of prizes also! In the same vein as the prize winner above, Lanie Tankard wrote, “I am still that little girl.” Lanie names a universal truth for all memoir writers. Our childhoods never disappear completely. All that we are and will become was there from the beginning. The statement suggests we sometimes need to be reminded to be kind to ourselves.

Donna, you hit me with the statement, “I’d like to do it again.” Your statement has a kind of delicious ambiguity. It could be a regret for not having done what you wanted to do in the first place. It could also be the result of so much joy of living that, like the kid who has just dived off the board and resurfaced, you want to go a second time.

Sally Rogers appealed to my 60-plus years sensibility with “Nearly all is said and done.”  Again, the interpretation is bitter/sweet. Life is passing fast. This could be spoken with gratitude and anticipation, with resignation, and with bitter regret.  It could also be about novelty rather than the passage of time–another way of saying with Solomon that there is nothing new under the sun.

Adam Tice, on the other hand, offered “There’s always something more to say.” Another lovely statement redolent of multiple meaning. Could be the memoir of a talkative person. Could be a philosophical statement about the impossiblity of endings. Could be just getting in the last word.

Finally, Grandpa1 amused me with “Still looking for my pivotal event.” I’ll admit that the statement would not have attracted me as much if it had come from teenager1. From a grandpa, however, it made me chuckle. I can interpret it as a spoof on developmental theory. I can interpret it as genuine yearning for transformation even at the last stages of life. And, above all, I see it as active yearning rather than passive acceptance. Go grandpa!

I loved all the entries, of course. And I thank everyone who commented. If you disagree with my judgments, let me know–or start your own contest.

Prizes

Chin wins her choice of books from the six on my shelf that I am giving away. I have added to the Judith Jones book five others.  I know four of the winners, but Donna and Grandpa1, you are new to me.  To all six of you–if you write to shirley.showalter@gmail.com, we can discuss the books and how to get them to you.

I’ll leave you with Paul Simon’s phrase that happens also to be a six-word memoir: “Still crazy after all these years.” You can substitute any other adjective for crazy and make your own statement.

Let me know if you enjoyed the contest whether you entered or not. Shall I do this again sometime?

One of my colleagues, Deb Higgins, sent around an email that has evidently gone viral.  It depicts lots of items remembered only by Baby Boomers and their elders. I used the skate key picture from that email as an illustration for Lanie Tankard’s guest blog on Touchstones. But I thought you might like to see the whole lost of nearly-forgotten items from 60′s and 70′s pop culture. Perhaps the list will stir you to comment or share a story that the item brings to mind!

How many of these do YOU remember???

45 rpm spindles Green Stamps Metal ice cubes trays with levers Beanie and Cecil Roller-skate keys Cork pop guns Marlin Perkins Drive in Movies Drive in restaurants Car Hops Studebakers Topo Gigio Washtub wringers The Fuller Brush Man Sky King Reel-To-Reel tape recorders Tinkertoys Erector Sets Lincoln Logs 15 cent McDonald hamburgers 5 cent packs of baseball cards Penny candy 25 cent a gallon gasoline Jiffy Pop popcorn 5 cent stamps Gum wrapper chains Chatty Cathy dolls 5 cent Cokes Speedy Alka-Seltzer?(Plop-Plop Fizz-Fizz Oh What a relief it is) Cigarettes for Christmas Falstaff Beer Burma Shave signs Brownie camera Flash bulbs TV Test patterns Old Yeller Fire escape tubes Timmy and Lassie Brylcreem Aluminum Christmas Trees To complement the list above, here is another nostalgia link list. Do you love to be reminded of these past cultural icons in memoir, or do you find nostalgia distracting to the real reason you read?

Guest blogger Lanie Tankard returns today to talk about memories of her childhood using  “luminous particulars”-a phrase borrowed from Jane Kenyon and Ezra Pound via my former colleague at Goshen College Ann Hostetler. Lanie’s word for those wonderfully evocative objects is “touchstones.” If you enjoy this beautiful essay, you may want to read her first guest post here.

Touchstones

By

Lanie Tankard

I am holding in my hand a rusty key. No door does it open, but the mere touch against my palm unlocks a flood. Strange how memories descend unbidden.

At the top of this key is a six-sided hole through which I put string to wear around my neck. The bottom of the key has no teeth to toss the tumblers in a lock, however. It bends instead at a right angle encompassing another hole, this one square. That opening fit the bolts on my roller skates so I could tighten them around the underside of my saddle oxfords.

Then, once the straps were buckled around my toes and ankles, those gray metal skates were ready to roll down Selwyn Road. My six-year-old legs pushed first one and then the other forward — up, up, up that long ribbon of sidewalk between the postage-stamp lawns and narrow grassy strips dotted with maple trees next to the street.

Rolling like a river, I’d cruise until the toe of a skate caught one of the cement slabs forced upward by expanding tree roots, flinging me rapidly downward onto my knees and taking the wind out of my sails. Tears trickled across my freckled cheeks while blood oozed down toward my bobby socks. I tottered home a sadder but no wiser girl, though, for I would be out there the next day after school, my knees painted Mercurochrome red and my skates ready to spin again.

That powerful panorama from my formative years popped up on the Magic 8 Ball of my memories all because I held an old rusty key in my hand. The physical reality of a touchstone can have a powerful effect on our buried images.

Originally, “touchstone” referred to a stone that left a mark, like chalk. What remained behind was a representation, a reminder. It also meant a stone tablet (slate, for example) upon which a mark is left by softer metals. The word is defined as “a standard by which something is judged” and has thus come to mean an object we can touch that brings up a memory associated with it, akin to a memento.

A character named Touchstone in the role of the court fool appeared in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, constantly clowning, perhaps underlining the capricious nature of memories. A famous monologue from that same play may shed light on the role of touchstones in helping us recall earlier stages of our lives:

“All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.”

The interesting thing about touchstones is that what might be one for me is not necessarily one for you, although certain collective touchstones when seen or heard can come to represent a time or place for a whole country or generation — to wit, a poster with the image of Che Guevara, or a Beatles record, or a peace symbol. Of course, when these touchstones can literally be touched, they become so powerful that they represent an entire era.

From time to time, my three daughters would bring me boxes of “stuff” they no longer wanted, saying, “Do whatever you want with it — just don’t put it back in my room!” So, to reduce their clutter, I would sort through it all, culling the wheat from the chaff, donating, tossing out, until a certain wooden duck, say, or perhaps a Care Bears purse, or maybe a colorful Mexican pot would trigger a tableau in my mind of that daughter using the item, much like a scene from an old newsreel.

Swiftly and surreptitiously that object would go back into the “save” pile, which would soon overtake the “toss” and “donate” stacks. I felt honor bound as a mother to hold onto such things as if in a time capsule for an adult daughter searching for her identity someday, or a grandchild in the distant future on an archaeological dig for what made the parents tick.

From time to time, a daughter passing through the living room or den might spy one of these items I had cleverly woven into the interior decorating and pause.

“Didn’t I throw that out…?” she’d start to say, but then, shrugging her shoulders, move on.

Yet can we really select touchstones for another? While there are definite commonalities, there are also individualities — that Rosebud quality underscored by the classic movie “Citizen Kane.”

Indeed, I still yearn for the black cast-iron trivet given to me as a small child by Aunt Mary and Uncle Fred. It featured sheep jumping over a fence, with the words “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” above them. My father had attached the trivet to a small wall lamp and hung it as a nightlight in my bedroom. Every evening of my childhood, I fell asleep looking at those words in the dim afterglow of the bulb after my mother tucked me in. When I was at college, my parents passed the lamp on to my young nephew. One day when he was older, I asked my sister if she still had the lamp, but she said she had sold it at a garage sale.

Was that the point at which the trivet became a touchstone for me, when I could no longer physically touch it except in my memories? Is an inaccessible object a touchstone? I’ll always wonder, I suppose, what memories might be unlocked if I found it. I’ve combed eBay with no luck. Jorge Luis Borges speculates through a short story in his book Ficciones that things  “lose their detail when people forget them.” The loss of that trivet hasn’t erased my memory of it, but Borges suggests that the excavation of old objects allows us “to question and even to modify the past, which nowadays is no less malleable or obedient than the future.”

Recently I sent a book to a friend who had just given birth to her second baby. I love to help stock the libraries of newborns, to enable them to discover the joy of reading. When I received the thank you note, I cried. The mother said her daughter would definitely treasure the book because it was the only one she now owned. Their house had burned down three days before my gift arrived, and they lost everything, even their beloved dog. The parents and the two little girls were not hurt, thank goodness, but I couldn’t help thinking about all those touchstones. How does a person recreate the tactile reminders of a life lived?

When I turn the well-worn pages of my copy of Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child, I am on my mother’s lap again. If I could find Evelyn Scott’s The Fourteen Bears in Summer and Winter, a book that I checked out of the library almost every other week to read to our three girls, I would have a daughter on my mind’s lap for sure. I could probably find electronic versions of these classics to download, but the tactile nature of books is important to me in my reading. The adult is always searching for the child still within, as well as reminders that the person’s own adult children were actually smaller at one time. Touch plays a major role in accessing our inner selves.

But so do all the senses. If I sit down and try to recall with clarity the summer of 1954 in my life, I can likely dredge up vague events that probably occurred. Yet if I chance upon a black-and-white photo of a blond short-haired girl sitting in a blow-up wading pool with a friend on a warm Cleveland afternoon, it is not the contact of the picture on my hand that brings a rush of memories but rather the sight of the image on the paper that does. I can feel the water against my legs and the concrete driveway underneath the pool’s thin plastic bottom. I can see Mrs. Kirby’s laundry hanging on the clothesline next door, and my mother coming down the back steps with a couple of Brown Cows for us to drink.

I can hear the bubbles I blew through the straw in that root beer float as we tried to outdo each other with the biggest mound. I can taste the cool liquid going down my throat, and feel the ice crystals in the vanilla ice cream against my tongue.

So a touchstone may not need to be felt — merely seen, or heard, or tasted, or smelled, perhaps. What if you don’t have a touchstone? What if your house burns down? How, then, will you ever access all those memories? Through memoir. If you write it, they will come. Touchstones simply speed up the process. They’re not a requirement.

But still . . . if you should happen upon an old rusty skate key, oh what a flood of skinned knees it will unlock in your mind.

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©Elaine F. Tankard                               August 2009