“Memory is non-linear by default!”
I scrawled this on the back of a grocery receipt in April of this strange year of 2021. I do that a lot. If I don’t, I will forget whatever I think are the fleetingly, occasionally notable introspections, that pass through my admittedly limited mind.
I bought Texas Toast, Paul Newman’s Marinara sauce, and bananas according to the computerized print on the back of the receipt.
Now that we’ve established the theme of this meandering memoir regarding memory, let’s delve deeper...
Flash forward to the May 2021 graduation ceremony held on the football field of Central DeWitt High School.
I’m leaning against the Birney Field bleachers underneath an overcast sky. Ideally, and if I was more of a professional with a desire to be seen as such, I’d be sitting with my fellow educators, wearing a traditional, uncomfortable, graduate robe seated on an equally uncomfortable folding chair up front.
“Are you going to be sitting with the staff?” asks my esteemed colleague Eddie Mercado via text.
“No.”
Pause.
“LOL!”
I only have limited time to organize the senior photo once the students waltz off the stage with undiminished optimism. I have an out and I’m going to run with it.
You have to hook the line and sinker ASAP in the journalism game to do it right. Get the quote and/or photo in the moment and deal with consequences later. A lot of student journalists struggle with this concept because of fear of imagined retaliation. Sometimes rules need to be broken. I’m probably a bad influence on the youth of today but I care more about the final product than decorum. Plus, I’m willing to take the heat for them and I tell them so.
Labor of love and all that.
Visually peruse the shot on the cover of the graduation keepsake. They’re keepers, for sure: the photos and the seniors.
I look at those kids and project my own experiences from memory. I can’t help it. I’m old and it’s intuitive.
Many seniors throwing their mortarboards in the air will, statistically, have to contend with the embarrassment of personal and professional failure, heartbreak, the shame of missed opportunities, death of loved ones, and the general sense of loss that inevitably comes with life as an adult. That’s not to say they haven’t already, of course. I don’t know all of them, but my heart (what’s left of that dying starfish) feels for them in a weird way when I look at the photo. Maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe I’m too realistic.
Maybe both?
But the class of 2021 isn’t thinking of any of those issues from the looks of their maskless faces in the shot. There’s excited smiles and open mouths, as if cheering, as they throw their mortarboards as high as possible: one hand extended to the sky and another clutching a sheet of freshly-printed paper enclosed in a leather envelope that they earned over the past four years or so. I wish them well. After over ten years working in the public education system, I’d be a genuine jerk not to. I’m not a gatekeeper of joy.
Flash back to 2003 .One of my favorite punk bands, Artless, has a song called “When You’re My Age, You’ll Be Selling Insurance!” No disrespect to those in that industry, but I’m not cut out for it and I know it. The author and vocalist, Mykel Board, wrote columns I devoured as a teenager in the zine, Maximum Rock and Roll. Board and Hunter S. Thompson are still two of my literary idols who proved, despite my own English teachers’ naggings, that captivating writing can (and should) be dangerous and honest and realistic and tell an interesting story and not necessarily be centered around the feelings flowers and loser ex-boyfriends/girlfriends can evoke. To hell with that drivel. Shove it down your therapists’ throats. Your insurance companies pay them enough.
Flash forward to the senior photo last month. If you care to exercise your Where’s Waldo skills, you will notice a student grimacing with eyes closed, presumably, and understandably, predicting the sharp edges of a mortarboard descending on his head. You will notice several others staring directly into the camera with the blatant opinion that this is all a charade of meaningless ceremony and symbolism not worthy of their time. Going through the motions. For their parents and geriatric relatives. They have to work tomorrow, if not later in the afternoon. There’s probably some truth to this approach but I’m not in the mood to go into it because every kid deserves all the possible positive thoughts at this moment in their lives, right?
Right?
Flash back to the minutes before the camera’s shutter starts.
“Ok!,” I yell, to the half-interested group standing in front of me with my best “coach” voice.
“This is our last chance to take the senior group photo! I’m going to count to three and then you’re going to throw your mortarboards in the air again! Just like you did before! Got it?!”
“You mean our diplomas?,” asks some kid I don’t know.
“No. Your… hats.”
But in that shot, I imagine, many in the crowd probably resemble who they were when they started school years ago while skipping off to kindergarten: smiling, rosy-cheeked, with hope in their eyes, eager to learn, and new clothes and stiff Dora the Explorer or Transformer vinyl backpacks and the belief that school will be fun.
Woo.
In the moment. Generalized happiness. Possibly fleeting but the joy that only young people can experience after a moment of accomplishment. When the various doors aren’t unreasonably and randomly slammed closed all the way to them with an insulting smack, if only temporarily. But still…
Flash back to May 2004. I’m 18 and just finished the ordeal that was my own high school experience. Good riddance, I thought.
I’m in the Rock Island UAW hall, surrounded by a miasma of marijuana smoke, body odor, and spilled Milwaukee’s Beast on a filthy concrete floor. Slick and utterly sickening and worse than the bands playing, if that’s possible. It’s a hardcore punk rock show and I’m stupidly standing on a collapsible folding chair I dug up from a back room trying to get a shot of the band blasting out its BS noisy nonsense.
The head injury I deserved from falling off said chair, fortunately, never happened.
If my damaged memory serves me correctly, the band’s name was Asshat.
The QC Punk Scene was never supposed to be classy; it was a place for those of us who weren’t necessarily top athletes and/or didn’t fit in. Misfits, malcontents, and weirdos, but generally decent kids who just needed a space to let off some steam: be it on stage or in the crowd. I was in both and I feel for the kids nowadays who will never get to experience what that was like. Some of them need it and video game systems and social media can’t ever fill that void.
It seemed cool at the time to take shots of grimacing groups on stage as a shaggy-haired photographer in a baggy Dead Kennedys t-shirt: back when kids were in bands and left unsupervised in union halls and I had hair. However, the crowd of kids slam dancing in the mosh pit seemed more interesting than the band onstage that humid night. I aimed my lens at the crowd to try to capture the visceral emotion that only a young person, deafened by slashing guitars, thundering cheap drums, and getting playfully pushed around like puppies can exhibit. Minds temporarily liberated of all the nonsense thrown in their faces from teachers, parents, coaches, and cops for no fault of their own other than looking the part of unjustifiable mistrust from the later…
Like the class of 2021, the expressions in that mass of bodies stuck with me over time. To describe their faces as innocent is inaccurate; it’s more like a lack of concern that only the momentarily carefree youth can convey.
There’s some valiant efforts to stay victorious against adolescent struggles that I see as nothing short of courageous. Then and now.
Flash forward to 2021. This month. June. My phone. Batteries on the verge of breakdown. I’m thirty five and probably in the same state as the alkaline miniatures, given the personal and political implications of the horrible nightmare of the past eighteen months.
Flash back. The composition of my most recent family photo is as such: my mother is smiling next to my younger sister. I’m holding Sasha, a bizarrely charming Bulldog/Corgi hybrid possessed by their breeds’ respective natures of perpetual positivity. My father is in the foreground.
It was taken by an anonymous nurse. My late father is lying vertically on a hospital bed. The sheets are not clean if you look closely but that’s easier said than done. There’s palpable pain everywhere. My mother, sister, Sasha, and myself are framed from the outside by a window due to COVID restrictions. An unbreachable glass barrier to the beloved patriarch.
It’s been over a year since that photo was taken. It’s difficult to look at because he died a week after. Snuffed it undeservedly and undeniably.
So, I make an effort to not look at it.
But I know where it is on my phone and in my head and heart and I hate the memories that leave me emotionally bankrupt.
Memories can be profound possessions: whether you want them or not.
“We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is it’s only measure.”
(Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)
Learn more about Jon on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Josh Thompson/flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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