My cousin Rhonda (on my mother’s side of the family) sent me a ton of pictures from our childhood as well as of her father’s (Uncle Donny’s) childhood. She was compiling these pictures to celebrate my Uncle Donny’s 80th birthday. Many of the pictures I hadn’t seen before. What I wasn’t prepared for was the powerful effect they would have would have on my soul. It is hard to describe the turbulence of sweetness and loss that they stirred up. Nostalgia isn’t a big enough word at all to describe it. I need a new word for this. Let’s call it dulcisdolores. Dulcisdolores is an instantaneous hyperemotional response to a stimulus involving the long forgotten past. It has an effect similar to time travel as well. For a moment, a very brief moment, the mental recall is so powerful that you can almost touch and smell and taste the past. People you loved, who are now long dead, are alive again and sitting around on the lazy summer lawn in the evening like they once did when you were a child. Dulcisdolores is painful thing, but it’s the kind of pain you wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
When I was three years old, we moved away from the little town of Paxton, Ill to a small town in Indiana. But all my uncles, cousins, and grandparents still lived back in Paxton and so we made occasional trips home in the summer or at Christmas to see everyone. Perhaps it is because I didn’t grow up with my cousins around all the time that I felt such a tremendous sense of anticipation when I came to see them and play with them in that little town with paving brick roads and those big gingerbread houses that were all painted white.
Time has gone by. A lot of time. I went off to Lincoln Christian College after high school, dropped out and got involved in a religious movement, married, had children, left the religious movement after twenty years of trying to make that delusion work, went to IU, became a teacher and watched my own children grow and launch. I didn’t get back to that little town very often. I didn’t see my cousins very often anymore. Most of my Aunts and Uncles are still living today, but when I have seen them, I am aware that time has done its work on them and they are not young anymore as they are in my perpetual memory of them. That may be why the photos have the impact on me that they do. They represent the way my parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents are in my eternal memory: forever young and strong; forever taking care of us children so that we could play always and eternally on long summer days and never have to worry about anything.
The power of a photograph, and especially in an old photograph, isn’t so much in what is actually visually seen. Its power lies in its ability to evoke and stimulate the memory. I see so much more than the photo. I remember. And what I remember is, for instance, my grandmother’s face, her dialect, her movement, her smile. Her lawn practically glowing in the evening sun, people sitting around on the metal lawn chairs, and I remember the color of the sky, the smells of cut grass and cigarettes, the feeling of the cool evening air on the skin, the sounds of the locusts in the elms, it all floods back so fast and so real that, if I let it go unchecked, I could cry and cry. It wouldn’t be sorrow exactly; it would just be feeling, wonderful, awful, powerful feeling. Here is meaning, deep meaning. Meaning that cannot be expressed in words or philosophy. The profound meaning of life is found in simple things--like a song Grandma Sophie used to sing: “Two little children a boy and
a girl…” The voice lived, sang, and passed away. The voice sings no more except in my memory, along with her apple pies, the endless pancakes, the treats she kept for me on the top of the refrigerator, the way she would stare out the window in the morning as she sat drinking her coffee at the kitchen table, and a thousand more memories. As long as I have a mind that retains its memory, I will cling to these images, and the images of all my loved ones. All the simple little things they do that mysteriously become so profound with time.I had a good childhood. I am grateful for my parents, my uncles and aunts, my wonderful grandparents for making it so.
