Unintended but Vivid Flashbacks
Recently my sister gave me an envelope full of memorabilia saved by my mother, who died decades ago while I was living in South Asia. Evidently she was quite a hoarder. As I perused the material, I came across class pictures from elementary school (I recognized all the faces and was surprised how many names I could remember), report cards from kindergarten through eighth grade (the one that struck me most was the sixth grade report – the teacher had given me almost straight A’s and a 1st honors ribbon, but in the box asking whether I had put forth sufficient effort she wrote “no” for every term), and certificates of accomplishment for high school debate, sophomore high school football, and junior varsity basketball. The items that impressed me most, though, were letters I wrote home after I had moved out of the homestead into the wide world.
Several letters, for instance, were from the University of Santa Clara, where I went for one year of college and got thoroughly messed up by using too much cannabis and hallucinogens. My tone to my parents, however, was always upbeat and informative. I told them about my Shakespeare class (fun), New Testament class (boring), and math class (difficult – I eventually dropped it). I have no idea why I took that class on the New Testament – by that time I had become fed up with organized religion. I remember that for the final paper I wrote an anti-war political treatise instead of the theological paper the priest teaching the class had requested; he still passed me, but with a low grade. My ultimate academic audacity, though, was perpetrated in an English composition class; after a couple of sessions I stopped going because the teacher, in my opinion, was so mind-numbingly uninteresting. Instead, I wrote a fantasy story roughly in the tone of The Lord of the Rings, turned it in to the teacher at the end of term, and told him I deserved an A because I already knew how to write. He probably should have been outraged, but he wasn’t; he gave me an A minus and said my skipping class was “no great matter.”
In one letter I describe an outing with some friends. We “went up into the hills and hiked around. We found an old shack with a fireplace in it. Nobody lived there so we decided to spend the night, since it was a hard hike out of the valley where we were. So we stayed and it rained Thursday night and the roof leaked and it was really cold. We had to keep the fire going all the time, so we could only sleep for an hour or so at a time. Thrills.” What I neglected to mention was that throughout this experience we were all blasted out of our heads on acid.
The best thing that came out of my University of Santa Clara experience was the realization, while taking a course in science fiction as literature, that I wanted to be a writer. To this end, I attended the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle, but since I was still struggling to come up with ideas, I decided to get out on the road and find out what life was all about. My first trip was from Seattle to Los Angeles and from there to Mexico and Guatemala and back. I was pleased to find in this envelope from my mother several postcards I’d written from Mexico and Guatemala. These included details that I’d long since forgotten, such as, for example, that I saw Pele play in Guadalajara stadium and that the route back from Guatemala took me through Belize (one more country to add to the total I’ve visited).
After my trip to Central America I decided to move down to Los Angeles and, with the help of some friends from Clarion West, try my hand at scriptwriting. I was pleased to find in the envelope a long letter I wrote from my apartment in the San Fernando Valley. Again there were details I had forgotten, such as watching my Clarion West mentor Harlan Ellison composing a story in the storefront window of the Change of Hobbit bookstore, or attending a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society with my Clarion West buddy Paul Bond, or attending a party at another bookstore where the guest of honor was Ray Bradbury, or studying a pile of scripts that my Clarion West buddy Russell Bates gave me, or getting a late night visit from a woman who drove me from Seattle to L.A. on her way to Arizona. She drove all the way back from Arizona to visit me; I am surprised that I have no recollection of her.
Anyway, all this to say that this particular trip down memory lane was profoundly satisfying and worthwhile. It made me wonder what other important snippets of life get erased by time as we journey through life. I suppose that’s the value of memorabilia: to serve as mnemonic devices to bring back details of times forgotten.
