Red House Painters, in their song 'Have You Forgotten' describes with compelling accuracy what childhood in the late Eighties was like. Between the ages of 2 and 9 were a time, for me, of long hair on boys and short shorts with high socks, new records on those special Fridays, and the Pontiac Boneville wagon with wood-grain on the side. It's difficult to put my memories of my parents then in tune with what my parents are like today, but I'd like to think that it was a melancholy time for them too--melancholy as in the way the upstairs was dead still on summer afternoons on the weekends, with that light shining in on the pale yellows, the pale blues, the pale pinks, and my sister's bulging bangs and our children's books. Everybody has photographs of these moments that none would deny their melancholy tone. Christmas pictures with browns and deep greens, bright reds, and earth-toned clothing. Summer pictures with a thin layer of sweat on the brow, newer tract housing in the background, and tables set with glasses stamped with yellow, red, and green things on the outside.
I'd like to think that it was melancholy for my parents because I see some of my friends in the same position today that my parents were in at the time of these memories--the time of Red House Painters' 'Have You Forgotten.' ("when we were kids, we hated thing our sisters did"). It is the position of being young but realizing that you are getting older; of still being a dreamer of your life-to-be but realizing that what you face every morning when you get up in the cold bedroom is your life-to-be just as much as it is the moment; of longing to go it without the veneer, the anticipation of the regular, but knowing deep down that regularity is too often the best way to keep going at all. I imagine that my parents, particularly my mother, had a hard time facing these things with three kids surrounding them at all moments, each a year older or younger than his or her nearest sibling. I might even venture to say that my brother and sister and I would grasp and articulate a common solidarity of seeing our parents in this position in the late Eighties. We did not, of course, know it at the time, but children understand in ways that they just aren't able when they hit adolescense and never recover when they grow into adults (for the most part). We would know that it was a hard time for our parents, even though they loved us very clearly.
But trying to go without the veneer of a wife and kids, of the post-war way, of the exploding global world where credit cards and cable television were coming around, without the anticipation of normalcy--not knowing what five years would bring but then again knowing in that part of us that projects the melancholy of real life into the visions of life-to-be exactly what five years would bring; not being able to let go in the ways of days gone by but simultaeously clueless about what to do next, today, now, here, for these children and this spouse and this house and this person, this soul, this identity, this story, this being, this mind--all of it...is hard. I know it was hard on my mom and dad to work their lives out in that slowmotion sunny haze of the dusty Eighties for themselves, for each other, for their children, and for their vision and hopes for life-to-be.
And yet, I know that my parents were free-thinking enough to figure it out. I see some of my friends with children doing the same. And if I asked my parents today about those inchoate days from 1982-1991, I think they would grow somewhat sentimental for that time when everything seemed uncertain but at the same time fundamentally and essentially real. I think they talk about the subtle war they fought as individuals and as a couple and as a family to get a grounding on it all. But I think they would also say that they didn't realize this quiet melancholy war when it was being waged until after the fact. It is here, that they would find their younger idiosyncracies and free will, their confident rejection of the veneer, and not their not being embarrased about their lives as they were, to be the stuff of sweet recollection, humor, and fondness.
'Have You Forgotten' reminds me of those times when I sat upstairs in the pale yellow hallway late the afternoon of a summer Saturday reading 'A Child's Garden of Verses' with a sort of nappy drowsiness while my parents went about life downstairs waging their quiet, subtle war for the autonomous self, reconciling their stories, accepting the emerging, finding beauty in the present as a promise for rootedness in the future. Even these pursuits of war they might not be able to articulate today, but I remembered as a teenager to remember that I witnessed it when I was a child, 1986.
Chanson d'installation: Red House Painters, Have You Forgotten?
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