What Falls In Between

Standing out back behind my office, a cool breeze cut through the warm, heavy air, and for a moment I could smell mulberries, the scent of which always takes me back to a time that I recall without words or much meaning at all—when I was still a toddler, and the tiny house we lived in had a backyard with a big mulberry bush. The moment got me thinking about memory, which is, perhaps strangely, one of my favorite topics of directionless, daydreamy contemplation. From the moment I was old enough to look backwards at a definable period, and realized there seemed to be a particular feeling with which I associated it, I began to wonder occasionally how I would remember the time I was in at the moment. I’d even make predictions, but of course by the time I was looking backwards, the predictions had faded, not to be recaptured.

I kicked off my sandals and walked barefoot in the grass while I smoked a cigarette, and I started to think about how I might recall this time, five or ten or twenty years from now. Will I remember hopefulness, anger, fear, which I seem to feel in equal measure? Will this, too, have passed, ending not with a bang but a whimper, and lay itself across my memory with less effect than I expect? The tones and shades of my memory of this time may well be influenced by how the nation chooses to regard it.

The years 1945 to 1960 are often referred to as a golden age of America, after boys who were ripped from the arms of their belles and sent to another continent to fight a great war against tyranny and despair, had returned home as men, as heroes, and set to work, every last one of them, grabbing the American Dream with both hands. On the GI bill, they went to college and found themselves good jobs in an expanding economy. Scientists in white lab coats and square, black-framed glasses toiled away, trying to pull ahead in the Space Race that had captured Americans’ imagination. Teenagers hung out at sock hops and neon-lit diners, girls longing for lavaliers and boys who wondered how to get laid. It was the dawn of suburbia, with fancy, new-fangled household gadgets to make life easier, and television, and TV dinners. Elvis’ pelvis was considered a scandal, and Marilyn Monroe a bombshell. Dad had a pension and the promise of a gold watch after 30 years, and Mom had a Frigidaire. And everyone was happy.

At least in the national memory, they were. That time was imperfect like any other, and perhaps even more so than most. Half a million of those boys who went off to war never came home—and some of them weren’t boys at all, but men, who left wives and children with desperate struggles in the place where their husbands and fathers had been. Some who had come home were never the same, their bodies or minds damaged beyond real repair. Segregation was about to come to an explosive ending (in the legal books, anyway), future feminists and gay rights activists were beginning to get restless with the political and cultural marginalization they experienced, McCarthy was on his Communist witch hunt, and we fought an all-but-forgotten war in Korea for three years and lost over 35,000 soldiers. There were back-alley abortions, and J.D. Salinger, James Dean, and the beatniks represented a side of popular culture that never quite made it onto Happy Days, a show that brought the nation’s memory of the era to life. The Cunninghams never had to find out that Elvis and Marilyn both died of drugs.

In each of our histories, outside of what we remember fondly, there are the things we just can’t recall, the things we choose to forget, and the things we’d forget if only we could. The same is true of our national memory; there are times we cannot forget, and shouldn’t, even if we wanted to—Nixon will always remain shrouded in shame, never to be celebrated as a good president. Reagan is another story—we seem to have become as forgetful as he was, and his lasting legacy is more positive than not in the nation’s memory, although it probably doesn’t deserve to be. And often, the way we feel about whether our presidents have been fairly judged when their tenure has passed confers an associated feeling onto the time itself. (How do you feel about the ’80s?)

President Bush is widely (and probably correctly) regarded as having been fixated with shaping his legacy from the moment he stepped into the Oval Office. He would like nothing more than to be The Man Who Democratized the Middle East, but it’s a dubious hope at best, at the moment. His adulators put his name on their cars and his initial on baseball caps, and when he has served out his time as our leader, they will put his face on silver coins and petition to rename schools and highways in his honor—his legacy is already well-defined among them. I can’t imagine hearing such hogwash for the rest of days; I fear as I am constantly reminded of how he managed to hoodwink so many people, it will overshadow what I want to take with me from this time.

I want to remember this time as one where the few who were never enchanted by his determined, bow-legged march toward historical prominence eventually won the day. I want to recall the optimism I still feel that this is a time which won’t forever change us all for the worse. I want to look back from someplace further ahead and think of the friendships that were forged in this troubled time, between people who found solace in each other’s worries and complaints and passion and madness and humor, between people whose names and faces might never have been known to one another. I want these to be more vivid in my memory than the visceral revulsion I had from his sneer, or my exasperation and embarrassment at his representation of us abroad, or my dread that the Middle East will be ever so much worse for our folly. Because I have such hope for remembering this time fondly, I feel like I am in competition with the president—will he be the one to define his legacy, or will I?

It’s a silly question, of course (for many reasons), but it’s how I feel sometimes nonetheless. In the end, neither of us will matter, nor the people who fervently admire him, nor the people who feel the same as I do. What will matter is what his legacy becomes in our national memory, determined by what falls in between now and then, whenever then may be. It’s impossible to know what will come. Imagine being able to forget an entire war, just to make our national memory what we want it to be.

For now, I’ll leave these thoughts aside. I’ll probably never think of them again—it was just a few minutes with my toes in the grass and a quick post about this strange little thought. Maybe one day they’ll come back to me on a breeze, smelling of mulberries, and I’ll happily realize that this time is one I like to remember, no matter what followed.