Forgetting to Remember - Lyric Essay
Signs of the Times
It’s the late Eighties. President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to Berlin, declares:
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Two years later, Berliners do it themselves. They reunite Germany.
Consumerism is in full swing. Americans buy millions of products. VCRs, color televisions, cordless telephones, microwaves, washers, and dryers fly off the shelves. Americans flock to the mall, the center of consumerism, to get their hands on the new thing.
The Rubik’s Cube puzzles the world.
The first Final Fantasy video game launches.
Euro Disney is approved for construction on 4,940 acres of land located near Paris, France.
Time has been kind to the 1980s.
The Song
Whatever happened to predictability?
The milkman, the paperboy, evening TV.
Tuesday. 7 AM. 2010.
You miss your old familiar friends
Waiting just around the bend.
A school day. The morning sun streams through the window blinds.
Everywhere you look (everywhere you go)
There’s a heart (there’s a heart)
A hand to hold onto.
I awake to the tune gradually increasing in volume. It plays from a tiny 12-inch television.
Everywhere you look (everywhere you go)
There’s a face
Of somebody who needs you.
I shoot up to catch the tail end of the introduction.
When you’re lost out there and you’re all alone,
A light is waiting to carry you home,
Everywhere you look.
DISSOLVE TO:EXT. GRASS FIELD - DAYA family picnics in the foreground. SUPERIMPOSE: Created by Jeff FranklinDIP TO BLACK:And the show begins.
Full House.
For all of fourth and fifth grade, I woke up to this theme song. But only for these two years.
I didn’t own an alarm clock then. To wake up every morning, I set my TV to turn on at 7 AM. In my home, when you turned on the television, there was a 95% chance that it’d be on channel 31, 32, or 33. If you use Optimum, you know what these channels were: Disney, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon.
I especially loved Nickelodeon. I had Drake & Josh, The Fairly Odd Parents, Jimmy Neutron, Spongebob Squarepants, Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, iCarly, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. But these weren’t the programs airing on Nickelodeon at 7 AM. No, instead, it was this popular, innocent sitcom from the late eighties: Full House. This show’s theme song woke me up every day. And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Anatomy of Television
It’s September 22nd, 1987.
My father’s 21st birthday is tomorrow.
Full House makes its debut. It’s one of many in a sitcom revitalization, and will eventually join the likes of Cheers, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and The Golden Girls in the top 30.
Over sixty percent of Americans buy into cable. FOX, MTV, HBO, Showtime, and CNN make their debuts, challenging NBC, CBS, and ABC; the Big Three.
On average, Americans spend seven hours a day in front of the television.
Anatomy of Full House
San Francisco.
It’s wholesome!
Three adults and three kids.
Danny, Jesse, and Joey.
Cut. It. Out!
They’re wholesome!
DJ, Steph, and Michelle.
You got it, dude.
Did I mention that they’re wholesome?
DJ’s anywhere from 10 to 18 during the series. I’m 10.
Steph’s anywhere from 5 to 13 during the series. My sister’s 7.
Michelle’s anywhere from a baby to 8 during the series. My other sister’s 4.
In this way, the show lent itself incredibly well to relatability.
What I Know
The New Jersey suburbs are a nice place to grow up.
How to ride a bike without training wheels.
The standard volleyball serve.
Nickelodeon is Channel 33.
What I Don’t Yet Know
I’d lose touch with my childhood best friend.
I could learn something from anything.
I’d forget many of these days.
Self-awareness.
Signs of the Times
It’s 2010.
A magnitude 7 earthquake rocks Haiti to its core.
Iron Man 2 makes $128 million in its opening weekend. The superhero genre gains traction.
First follower theory is the concept that attracting an adherent to some kind of view or initiative is the first step toward beginning a movement that might seem unusual or out-of-step with the surrounding culture to the general population.
— Margaret Rouse
The success of Iron Man could have been a fluke. The success of Iron Man 2 proves it wasn’t. I didn’t catch on until much later. Instead, I found myself crying at the end of Toy Story 3. I wouldn’t cry for another nine years, tearing up throughout the third act of Avengers: Endgame.
Matt Smith makes his debut as the Eleventh Doctor in the longest-running show in history, Doctor Who. I wouldn’t catch on for a few more years. Instead, I ate up anything and everything that Disney and Nickelodeon gave me.
Instagram launches. I wait for three years before making an account because I’m having a personality crisis. The last thing I need is the pressure of social media.
Moment
Fourth grade. After-school volleyball tournament.
Indoors. The afternoon sun struggles to shine through the thin windows that line the walls of the gymnasium.
Six courts. Twelve teams. Ten to a team.
Sneaker squeaks and childish chatter reverberate off the tall ceiling.
I’m in the front line. I watch the ball soar over my head as my teammate serves the ball. It rolls off the net for the second time. A lost point for us.
Enraged, I whirl around.
“You gotta serve it over the net!” I scream as I stomp my foot.
Two more points go by before our team serves again. We rotate. I step into serving position.
I’ll show ‘em how to do it, I think.
A teammate passes me the ball. I catch it and cradle it in my left hand. A practice swing. Reset. Another practice swing. Reset. I look up at the net and it’s so much taller than it was a second ago. It’s so far away and I’m not sure I’ll be able to clear it.
I swing my right arm as far back as it’ll go and send the volleyball flying out of my hand. I watch it arc into the air.
It doesn’t make it close to the net.
A lost point.
My face flushes red. I hang my head in shame as the opposing team rotates. I brace myself for retorts.
Instead, I hear a fifth grader pipe up.
“Hey, it’s alright. You’ll do better in the next one.”
I still wonder who that person was.
They didn’t exact revenge, they didn’t exhibit smugness, they didn’t laugh at me. It was all warranted, but no. They showed me kindness.
The game ends. We lost.
Sweaty and broken, I trot over to my mother, who’s been watching from the sidelines.
“Where did you learn to act like that?” she asks. I’m afraid to meet her gaze. She thrusts my jacket at me and exits the building. I reluctantly follow.
Changed.
Location of Learning
School and parents. Those were the only things I thought I could learn from.
Books passed the time in the bathroom. TV shows were entertainment. Driveway basketball and bicycle races were time with friends. Everything had its place.
Who knew that there were lessons to be learned from all of these things?
If it wasn’t school, I wasn’t listening to learn. If they weren’t a parent, any mention of new information would get half the attention. My brain simply turned off, and with it, self-reflection.
TV shows weren’t meant to teach me something. They were meant to pacify me after a day of learning other things. The lessons of Full House didn’t stick. But I don’t doubt that they sunk in. They sunk in deep, straight into the darkest depths of my subconscious, but they sunk. That part of my mind knew right from wrong, decency from inadequacy, good from bad. Unfortunately, it rarely spoke to my conscious mind.
At least, not until after the Moment.
It linked these parts of my mind. I began drawing from all of these lessons that I had collected but never used.
I’d like to name a specific lesson that I learned from Full House, but my memory fails me.
Have you ever learned something, then forgot it, then learned it again, then forgot it again, and the cycle just repeats until the lesson finally sinks in after an unquantifiable amount of iterations?
I believe that there are parts of me that I first learned from Full House, then forgot. Then I learned it again somewhere else, and then another somewhere else, and then another, that now I don’t remember what parts they were. Now, it’s just common sense. Common decency.
But to a ten-year-old, nothing is common. Everything is new to a person who only has a decade of experience with this whole “life” thing. Everything has a lesson to offer.
Self-Aware
Thursday. 4 PM.
An early fall day at the start of fifth grade.
Our bicycles lie in a pile off to the side. We’re playing Knockout in my best friend’s driveway. Let’s call him Ethan.
Four players. Ethan, his brother Michael, their cousin Carter, and me.
It’s a speedy round. Michael makes it in before Ethan and passes it to me. I try to get Ethan out, but the ball keeps bouncing off the rim. Ethan sinks it and passes it to Carter.
I shoot the ball again. It spins out of the rim. Carter sends his shot. Swish.
I’m out.
Carter catches his ball and freezes. He braces himself for the waterworks. I pass the ball to Michael and smile.
“I’m not like that anymore.”
His shoulders drop in relief. They continue the game and I watch from the sidelines, ready and waiting for the next round.
Anatomy of Nostalgia
“I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.”
- Kris Kristofferson
Memory is…
...complex, interesting and mundane, twisted, fading, created, fabricated, fleeting, remembered and forgotten, cherished and buried.
Do we get to choose the memories that we want to keep with us for the rest of our lives?
Sometimes we do. I know I do. But for every memory I remember telling myself to remember, there’s one that I’ve forgotten. I’m sure that I’ve told myself to remember a moment in the moment and then forgot that moment many moments later.
But it isn’t completely gone. The memory lingers as an echo. A whisper of what once was. It could be a still frame of a moving memory forever lost. It’s like an iPhone’s Live Photo. I can remember a single slice, and if I press on it hard enough, that slice will move. Just a few seconds before and a few seconds after. But everything else is lost.
It’s always on the tip of my tongue, just like that word that I just know that I know but I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s there! If I can just get it out of there and put it here, in the present, so that I may finally remember and do something with it.
More often than not, there’s no specifics that I remember, but a feeling. It’s an indescribable feeling, but not in the way that you just have to experience it to know what it’s like. It’s indescribable in the way that it hurts so much that I can’t describe it. I want to describe it. I long to describe it. But I can’t, and I’m not very optimistic that I’ll ever be able to.
The pain of remembering.
My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.
- Abraham Lincoln
A painful pleasure. Not the pain of a papercut that you’d love to be removed of but the kind of pain you find yourself coming back for. Like that sore muscle that you can’t stop stretching and massaging even though it hurts because it’s a good kind of hurt. And you want nothing more than to have that pain wash over you and take you away from the papercuts of today because you’re just about able to describe that indescribable feeling and it’s waiting for you, teasing you, taunting you to reach out and seize it. It’s bitter and it’s sweet and it’s everything in between. There’s a word for that, isn’t there?
I just know there’s a word for that.
It’s right there.
Right on the tip of my tongue.
What I Found Out
I’ve learned my lessons. I try to be good. But rarely does the opportunity come that I get to confirm the validity of my efforts.
It does come, though.
For my first job, I work as a summer camp counselor at our local park. A baseball field covers the left half of the area. In the center of the park, under a sparse covering of trees, stands a hut. It houses the arts and crafts station in the front and the games and activities station to the right. A dozen benches dot the land surrounding the hut. The trees grow denser as a trail leads off to the right side of the park, where a playground stands. It has a jungle gym, a swingset, and a carousel.
I had attended this program as a camper since I was four. Over the years, I grew fond of this tentpole of my summer break. I made new friends and formed close relationships with the counselors. In my last years as a camper, I played chess every day with one counselor, Ben. We kept a tally of our wins and losses, and I’m pretty sure it ended in a tie at the end of the program. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
In 2016, I secured my position as counselor for the first time. Going in, I aspired to be like the counselors I had as a camper. Not only someone that the kids could feel comfortable being around, but someone that they’d want to be around. But with a reserved and quiet personality, I didn’t have a single clue how I’d achieve that.
At the end of the six-week program, I had done all right. I won Counselor of the Day once, but that sounds more prestigious than it really was. In terms of actual counselor work, I performed adequately, but I didn’t feel that I had achieved the level at which I held the counselors of my camper-years. I wasn’t terrible, but I wasn’t amazing, either.
So I tried again the next year.
Year two went by and I felt like I’d made incremental progress, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how to make it enough. I wasn’t extremely goofy, I didn’t have an air of coolness about me, and I couldn’t form those bonds like I had with Ben. I figured that I’d give it one more try the following year.
It’s 2018 and I park the car in front of the place that I’ve been coming to for the past 13 years. My sisters hop out of the car, one a camper, one a counselor. We go to our groups and I take attendance. I see some familiar names and some new ones. The day starts and the ship sails smooth.
It’s still smooth four weeks in, but I’m met with the same feeling that I’ve had for the past two years. I’m not doing enough, I think. Maybe I’m just not that kind of counselor. Maybe I’m just going to be an average one. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I’d like to be better, but don’t we all? If I have to settle, this isn’t a bad place to do so.
We bring our group into the center hut for the arts and crafts station. Today’s craft: Christmas ornaments. The campers get situated and begin decorating their wreaths. One of them, whom I’ll refer to as Josh, calls me over.
Josh is an interesting kid. He told me earlier in the program about his plans to revive the zeppelin industry, complete with a fancy folder full of schematics and business plans. He even had business cards printed out.
Josh calls me over and I sit across from him.
What’s up, Josh? I ask.
Do you have a job? he asks. I look at him a little funny.
Uh, yeah. I’m a counselor here! That’s my job, I say.
No, like, is there a leader for our group? he asks. I think for a bit, then say,
Probably Brandon. He seems to have the most control over you guys when you go crazy.
So what would your job be?
You mean, like a role?
Yeah.
Umm...I’m not sure. I haven’t given it much thought.
Because we thought your job was to be our friend.
. . .
Children wield the double-edged sword of brutal honesty. Sometimes, they can say really hurtful things. Sometimes, they’ll sputter utter nonsense. But sometimes, they can say something really, truly, unabashedly profound. Of course, they won’t be elegant or groundbreaking, but it’s profound nonetheless.
Insults are thrown and compliments are given. We seem to throw much more than we give. We’re at a point that we brace ourselves for a throw even when someone is giving. How cynical the world is. But children don’t have much experience with the world, and their innocence and naivety can lead to moments like this one. Comforting, simple, wonderful moments.
I’m not one to fish for compliments or seek validation, but it’s nice to be validated every once in a while. To know that I had not only connected with Josh, but that his group of friends thought that I, specifically, was tasked with befriending them, said a lot about how they viewed me. Thankfully, it was in a good light.
I don’t remember many moments like this one. This time, however, I don’t think it’s due to my faulty memory. It simply doesn’t happen that often. I hope I’ll remember this one for a long, long time. But sometimes, you don’t have to tell yourself to remember a moment. Sometimes, you can’t help but remember.
