Sans Fig Leaf
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"Like the ones I used to know"
30 November, 2006
One year at Christmas time I received a series of presents (from people who didn't know each other) that had one thing in common: they had been things that I had wanted when I was a child, but never had. Some of them were things I had never told anyone I'd wanted. It was a strange, but happy, coincidence. The same month, I had considered myself lucky to find compact disc copies of several Christmas music albums that my family had owned on vinyl when I was growing up.
I was explaining these odd coincidences to a friend, who commented that she had never felt any strong desire to own things from her childhood. It was clear from her tone of voice and facial expression that she found the very idea extremely odd. I tried to explain that there hadn't necessarily been any strong desire for these things. It was simply that when they happened to come into my possession, it made me happy.
Even that concept seemed quite alien to her. She disliked so much of her childhood, she said, that she couldn't imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to relive it.
Except this was not about reliving childhood, at least not in the sense of experiencing it again exactly as it happened the first time. The gifts were things I wanted but never got. So if there was any aspect of reliving childhood, it would be of the "what might have been" variety.
Even if I had been trying to relive childhood, it would have been my childhood--not hers. Just because her childhood was so horrible that no one in their right mind would want to relive it, that doesn't mean that other childhoods were not worth reliving. Or at least recollecting with some positive feelings.
As it happens, there were plenty of parts of my childhood that I disliked--so much so that I wouldn’t wish the experiences on my worst enemy. But there were also plenty of things that I enjoyed. Both the good and the bad contributed to making me the person I am now. While it is much more pleasant to be reminded of the good things, that doesn't mean I want to completely erase the other things from my memory.
What the gifts and the music came down to was not reliving anything, but remembering. We never remember anything exactly as it happened. What we remember is a strange hybrid of what the experience meant to us at the time, and what it means to us now. That meaning can change over time, which will change how we recall the incident.
None of the items were exceptionally valuable or important. One of the things that made them special was their context in my memories: things I had once longed for, but which had been out of my reach.
The other thing that made them special was that they had been gifts, tokens of affection from people who were now far more precious to me than those gifts had ever or could ever be.
--H. Jackson Browne
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