Nostalgia for the present

How can I explain my children to their future selves?

Here’s a song I sing sometimes when I’m walking with my kids:

When I look back upon my time

And see the snapshots of my life

You will not be surprised

To see your name across my smile

To see your name across my smile

I will remember you

I will remember you

I will remember you

The way you are right now

The way you are right now

The song is called “Kola” by Damien Jurado, one of my favorite living songwriters. Best I can tell, Jurado is singing about remembering the present moment at a future date. He’s promising to lock in a memory with someone and, in so doing, inducing a feeling of nostalgia for the present.

The first time I heard “Kola,” it sounded like a song for a spouse on a wedding day. On subsequent listens, the image that came to mind was of the narrator watching a loved one succumb to dementia and promising to remember her the way she is now, before the dark days come.

Now I mostly think about the song in terms of watching my kids grow up: Before my daughter starts kindergarten, before she learns to ride a bike and so on, I will commit to memorizing her as she is right now with her leopard-print dress and her affinity for toilet jokes.

This interpretation is a lighter one, and it does not imply that the present moment is better than any future moment. In this light, the song is simply about the discipline of taking a mental snapshot.

I have tried to capture moments with my kids a few different ways. Like most parents, I take a lot of pictures. I have used my voice recorder to conduct interviews with them. And of course I write.

When my wife was pregnant with our third child, I decided I would start writing ongoing letters for my children to read at a future date, describing some of their mannerisms and interesting stories as they arose. I kept a notepad by the bed to jot down silly turns of phrases, moments when I was proud of them, and any other tidbits that struck me as worth remembering at the end of a day.

My letter-writing idea came in part from Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 epistolary novel Gilead. It’s been a decade since I read it, but the gist is that a Congregationalist minister named John Ames has spent his life serving a church in a small Iowa town and is close to death. He is writing down an account of his life for his 7-year-old son, who he fathered late in life after remarrying.

The book is sprinkled with tender moments like this one, from the first page:

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! Because you thought I was laughing at you.

Later, Rev. Ames puzzles over his relationship with his own father and wonders how his son will receive the letter:

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Unlike Rev. Ames, the fictional man of God, I’m pretty sure my life won’t warrant a memoir for public consumption. But I do think it is worthwhile to take stock of my relationship with my children and to explain myself as best I can. Whatever words I leave behind, I hope they convey the essential fact that I loved them at each stage of their lives.

But when I picked up the notebook in the evenings, I immediately started overthinking the project of writing to my future grown-up children. What if I was pushing my preconceptions onto them? What if I was reading too much into their personalities based on passing fancies and quirks of toddlerhood? How honest could I be about my struggles with depression, my frustrations with discipline, and my occasional feelings of inadequacy as a parent?

And then there were writerly concerns about what details would be interesting or illuminating to my adult children one day. Taking my own life as an example, I’m told I was a perfectionist child who liked to line up his toy cars with their bumpers in a neat row, that I was not interested in messy activities like finger painting, and that I possessed an early surplus of attention to detail. I have not changed much in the intervening years.

I didn’t make it far with my letters. Looking back over those few handwritten pages now, I realize I was mostly talking to myself. I failed to consider my audience, to think about what my children might want or need to hear one day.

I am feeling the impulse to collect memories of my kids again. My wife recently bought three hardbound notebooks so we could begin the letter-writing project again, this time with nicer stationery and more of a collaborative spirit between us.

This time, I am going into the exercise with an awareness that it’s partly selfish. I don’t want to forget details that made me happy. I want to experience nostalgia for the present, or nostalgia for the day that just ended.

I am also considering what my children will want or need to hear one day. I want these letters to be a source of comfort, an affirmation of each child’s unique beauty, and a tool to help us understand one another as adult peers, eventually.

I am still thinking about Rev. Ames. I flipped through my copy of Gilead today and re-read the passages I underlined in college, years before parenthood crossed my mind. 

At one point, reflecting on the nature of religious visions, Ames drops this baffling bit of wisdom on his son:

Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

I hope that my fumbling words will mean something to my children, even if they only make sense looking backward.

***

The picture at the top of the page is a selfie I took with my son in the atrium of the Columbia Museum of Art over the weekend. At the moment I took the picture, he was twisting around in my arms saying, “Look behind you, Daddy, it’s fire.” The sculpture is an untitled Dale Chihuly piece.

One piece of housekeeping for this week: I’ve created an online store on Bookshop, a bookselling platform that sends a portion of the revenue from each sale to affiliates (like me) and another portion to local independent bookstores.

Any time I mention a book in a Brutal South newsletter, I’ll add it to the Brutal South Book Club shopping list. The idea is to push back against Amazon’s hegemony in the book industry, provide a more ethical alternative for buying books online, and promote the books and authors I love. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, my friend Christen from the Itinerant Literate bookstore wrote a piece explaining the business model in Publishers Weekly last week if you’re interested.

As always, thank you for reading. If you’re interested in supporting the newsletter and haven’t already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month. I wrote a brief explanation of the business model, the platform, and the payment service here if you are interested in learning more.

OK. Enough self-promotion for now. Here’s my favorite article I read in the last week, “How Iowa Flattened Literature” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s from a few years ago, but I learned a good deal about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cold War cultural diplomacy, and the CIA’s influence on American fiction (seriously).