The Unused Folder

A Recollection

I reach down into my old backpack and pull out a folder. I start to remember. The mechanics of this cannot be refused, my eyes see the folder and a split second later I am walking in memories made ten years earlier.

You see, the folder is imprinted with a college’s name. Inside, there are still a few papers, handouts, testimonies from students. In memory, I walk through the college grounds. pausing to let the stillness of the place impress me. Can I live here? Will I wilt without a city near? And other vigorous flowers struggling for the light? I walk on and resolve to answer the question at the next building. That is a science building. Microscopes line tables, charts of dissected animals paper the walls. The next is the dance building. We prospective students are getting a show. The dance teacher comes out. An old, graceful, smiling woman. She seems to know things I don’t, both how to balance on one leg while posing, and how to move through the world, taking what is plentiful and creating what is rare.

Stock Illustration

I leave the campus and I have still not made up my mind. The thing about being indecisive is that you open yourself up to feeling abandoned by your own reason. Or your own taste. Why can I not solve this, like a math problem? This school will be better for me. Period. Done. Why are my own instincts illegible to me? I am choosing between two good things, perhaps, and comparing them is impossible?

This indecision, the fact that I never fully resolved to go to another school, makes the memory of facing the decision more vivid. I am always there. I have still not decided. It is always March 2015, always accepted students’ day. I am always 19. And I am never done questioning myself.

I put the folder down quickly. Almost as though I will stop thinking of that day a decade ago. As though I can defy Tom Stoppard and reverse causation, stir the sugar out of the tea, and things will be as they were five minutes ago.

But now the memories are lit in my head, tumbleweeds suddenly roused by wind. I was a writer back then. As I am now, though I was a different writer. And I remember all the time alone, trying to get closer to raw language and getting further away.

I had just moved and left high school two years earlier. I finished high school without my best friend since age 8. And suddenly I am again in 2015, and my best friend is a clear, crisp, laughing memory. He is like a recent day in the sun by the river, young and unstressed, and we are both happy to be with each other. And we do not think of rent and schoolwork and women, only of swimming and food and little funny stories.

Other memories surface as well. I have always had a great visual memory. I can see the bend in the road, the door of the middle school library. I can know the feel of the thing, if I let my mind caress it for a moment.

And then comes the question. What have I done in the last ten years? Why do I remember boyhood and teenage years so fondly? And the last ten years seem like shallow pools, skimmed cream, with less genuine, more instrumental friendships. With frustrations I had not known as a teenager, from jobs to women to debt. Perhaps it is the place I grew up in. Certainly, it was a little Eden. I should move back to Massachusetts, the Berkshires, maybe. Then I will live again happily. Perhaps it is just growing up. I have learned a lot in the last ten years. And gained job experience and social skills and humility. And underneath the humility, a striving, hungry, vital confidence. Perhaps the next ten years will be much clearer, lighter, stronger, now that I am better set up to succeed. Perhaps.

But I think I had a deeper vein of life in me then. I can prove it, actually. The older memories, before my decision (“which college?” being one of many decisions I have made) are realer. They are not scientifically more real, but they are more complete. The places I passed through and sat in, and the people I met, had more odor and flavor, and distinctiveness. I could stand before them or watch them from my classroom seat, and feel like a man considering a garden of flowers, which changed and morphed and smelled different constantly. It was a richer life, a less self-conscious world that I and my classmates and friends and my sister lived in.

I know! It is that I was noticing for the first time. Noticing how my German teacher had two seemingly distinct personalities, one authoritarian and one good humored. And then looking closer at her and noticing that these two commingled and informed each other. And then noticing that beneath either of these, was a more indescribable personal sensibility. And that taste, that specific Frau Risch spirit, made up of humors from her parents and her childhood friends in Munich, and her teacher training, and her latest talk with her husband. That taste could lead to laughter, or to arbitrary rules. that both actions were ways of dealing with something, of confronting a world that was slightly out of her control.

(It is fascinating, isn’t it, how adults deal with children? The children are so weak compared to them, physically and in the hierarchy of authority. And yet, children can tell the truth, or can disrupt a teacher’s plan. The good teachers, I think, accept that the children are slightly out of their control, and hope that the children find something beautiful and unknown to them out there. They place the child’s self-education above their own need to make the child in their own image. Then these good teachers need to master the taste of separating the out-of-control children with no orientation toward the good, from the out-of-control children who will disrupt others, and who delight in doing bad. The bad teachers just whinge in their own heads about how the children won’t shut up. The bad ones cannot direct the energy and curiosity anywhere useful.)

Yes, what I saw as a boy, I was seeing for the first time. Nothing replaces the thrill of observing the world and learning how it works. Then applying language to describe it, though language is never the real thing. I once had a teacher who claimed to me that children have incredible visual memories and sensitivity before they learn to read at age 6. Then, the visual memory and the ability to learn outside of language, to learn by seeing the worlds laws as little miracles which follow patterns, goes. It goes and it never quite comes back.

Oh, to see clearly again, unclouded by laws of nature and the gnawing impulse to acquire and instrumentalize all I see. Oh, to feel deeply again, uncynical about potential friends, not haunted by memories of romance gone wrong, love boats washed ashore, vulnerability not re-gifted.

Oh well. Once I was this way. I have a good memory.