An Acid Trip Down Memory Lane

Maybe it's a highway

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

I’d like to dissect this idiom. Is the trip a vacation? Is there a hotel? How long will I be away? Will I laugh to the point of losing control of my bowels? Or will sorrow from thirteen years ago be reignited in my bones?

If it’s a place that lingers in the mind, a motel might be involved. A trip within a trip. Remember that time we went to Santa Barbara? We stayed at a nice hotel. What was the name? Memory Lane can be foggy that way.

The less worldly may prefer to live on the cobble stoned street, creating a staycay. He misses the good ol’ days. Melancholy sets in as he pines for the past. He is anti-future, opposed to change. Too often, he reminisces about a fixed childhood when life was untroubled. If vicissitudes today are unwelcome, he may even invent a way to live in the past, a bubble that prevents him from learning or gaining wisdom.

Sometimes the trip is a daycay, especially if there is a class reunion. One might languish in the teenage times for the day, maybe longer if the memories are deep-seated. I have moments of this trip. A minute down memory lane if it’s a passing recollection or I might venture a short trip now and then, especially with my sisters or an old friend. Remember when…?

Nostalgia is another form of this expedition. I feel it when something reminds me of say, 1973, an old song. Where was I when Three Dog Night had a top ten hit? Ah yes, I was in the kitchen, on yet another, predictable hot day in Los Angeles. The transistor radio was tuned in to my favorite channel, KHJ. They “play all the hits.” Yes, there was an innocence that isn’t replicated today. We didn’t just drink out of a hose, ride in cars without seat belts and pedal our bikes without helmets. I remember at age five a friend and I searching for flavors of the environment. We put our tongues on a blade of grass, an exposed root. We avoided shrubs, flowering and otherwise, as we somehow knew they were unpredictable. We found a piece of fallen tree bark. My friend was sure it was edible. We peeled off the inside and chewed on it. It didn’t have a flavor and we didn’t die. That night, spent from a day of sampling the neighborhood, I ate my dinner and cleaned my plate, even though I had savored tree bark earlier. The next day my friend and I shoveled dirt and water into a beach pail so we could create mud. We were thoroughly enthralled with this effort. We believed we discovered a new cement. We could probably build a hut and sleep inside. I had just received a pillow for Hanukkah. I would bring that treasured gift and slumber well in our homemade dwelling. We dug our little hands inside the moist soil. I accidentally splashed mud in my friend’s eye, and she ran home (around the corner) crying. We played again the following day. She was fine. A little mud in your eye never hurts anyone. And now when I hear the famous toast I think of my friend.

I prefer the past to stay the past. There’s truth in the cliché-- It’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s antithetical to the character arcs of our lives. It’s bad fiction when the main character doesn’t grow or grow up. If she has a flat arc she hasn’t learned. Unless it’s a detective story. But even then, the supporting character has an arc. Don’t we all want to read about the hero who realizes something profound in the end? Don’t we all want to live that endless discovery in our own lives?

My husband doesn’t remember much from his childhood. His Memory Lane is perpetually cloudy, or night has encompassed the road and there are no streetlamps. I’ve learned about his childhood over the years, imparted to me by his oldest friend and now I’m the one who reminds my husband of his character growing up in San Mateo as if I were there. “Don’t you remember, honey? You didn’t like to share your toys.” Only the carefully plucked painful entries my husband remembers. However, he always recalls the abundance of love in his life without any further details. The love is what lit his street. The love is what lights future roads.

I’m glad I can visit moments. I can evaluate how it affected me, if there was joy or sorrow, if it gave me depth, a sense of self, and humor, and of course, I could write about it.

1.     Do you ever go down Memory Lane?

2.     What’s your favorite memory?

3.     Do you and a sibling have a different recollections from childhood?