The Analog Archives: Your History in Dead Technology
How to Survive the Emotional Wreckage of Digging Through the Past.
Don’t clean the basement, even if it floods.
Especially if it floods on your fiftieth birthday. If this happens, reread this post and pick up the phone and call the junk haulers to scrape the residue of your old life from its hiding place. Do yourself a favor and bypass the favorite pastime of a historical fiction writer: ruminating about the past.
Since I didn’t have a dear and devoted friend such as myself to warn me, or no Substack devoted to remedies for dwelling on the past (if you know of one, feel free to drop it in the comments) to rely on, I’m gifting you this sage advice: throw out the past before it’s too late.
However, if you’re like me, it’s already too late.
I turned fifty years old in January. This birthday was on track to pass better than my fortieth, which fell right after being laid off from my job and daily suffering when one of my kids played the Five For Fighting song 100 Years on repeat, which made me want to stab myself each time that opening piano tinkled. Click the link and give it a whirl, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This birthday, I had no intention of reflecting on the past. I was busy. The Historical Fiction Stack had a neat writing release plan blocked out in Excel and I was ready to tackle it in 2024. I had a shirt with Vintage 1974 to wear to advertise my age, and a list of goals to celebrate half a century of life.
But then two things happened.
First, water seeped into the basement, creeping from the four corners to the center like a live version of The Blob. Winter in northern New Jersey consisted of one torrential downpour after another and my basement, problem-free over the last thirteen years, bloomed water across the floor. One look at my hoarding tendencies and I knew that if the situation got worse I would be forced to either tackle the collection of memories/junk, or watch as my Breyer Horses, college notebooks and VHS tapes (I still didn’t throw out Dead Poet’s Society. I can’t) become waterlogged, so I cleaned.
One bin contained journals going back to middle school. I hadn’t looked through them in eons, mostly for the fear of spotlighting youthful foolishness. I flipped through the one from my sophomore year in college in 1994. I opened right to an entry exactly thirty years earlier in January of 1994, about a first date I went on with a guy named Ben, who eventually became my boyfriend. It was a fine date, but Ben was moving out of the state. Guess I’ll never see him again, I wrote. It proved to be a bad guess.
January of 1994 was one of the coldest ever experienced in Ohio (the Great Ohio Freeze) and I read through the memories of that first date on a night with temperatures in the 20s and the subsequent weeks and months that followed: a time of letters and cassette tapes mailed back and forth and eventually, a homecoming and a real relationship. I opened a different journal from my senior year and a photo of the two of us fell out into my lap.
We had broken up in the nineties, but had through social media remembered birthdays and periodically caught up. This year, he hadn’t wished me a happy birthday. He hadn’t been too engaged in Facebook, so I just figured he’d forgotten, but then on a whim I Googled his full name. The first entry was his obituary.
We have many deep places of sadness within us that are untouched until an event occurs that taps those emotional reserves and sends us reeling. It wasn’t only the pain of his passing at such a young age, but the conversation I wanted to have was now impossible. Losing the people in your life you shared special memories with hurts even when you aren’t in close contact. It triggered an intense longing for the pre-internet era, in the last breath of the twentieth century.
Ben and I both went on to work professionally in radio. Reading through the journal I was struck by the simple beauty of that time and how I missed just getting into the car and dialing through the radio stations separated by static fuzz. I found audio tapes from the first time I was on the air in 1993 at my college radio station to my last shift as a professional disc jockey in 1999. My voice sounds almost the same, but here and there I hear my daughter’s voice in mine. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I don’t miss rewinding and fast forwarding. That was for the birds.
The tapes and journals look and feel ancient now. I’m used to only carrying and using the phone. But I found another self in the recordings and pages from 1994 and through the end of 1999. The goals that were imagined and gained and lost through a fine autumn mist. Driving down lonely midwest highways and slamming a box of Parliaments against my thigh to properly pack the tobacco; the past thirty years stretching infinite before instead of their current place in the dust. The New York City skyline, marked by one spiral on the left and two towers on the right, all rising from what Bruce called the swamps of Jersey. My grandmother at the stove under a knotty pine soffit. Shutting the microphone off in a radio studio, Route 9 North waiting in the dark.
The Basement Project lasted longer than I wanted, but I managed to get ahead of the water and save what was valuable and ditch the rest. And then, the junk conquered, I got a message from my high school friend, Madeleine Cornet Dobson, that a two-day estate sale was happening at her family house in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Madeleine’s family had lived in the house for six generations, since the late 1800’s when the Cornet family arrived from France. Now her parents were selling. The house was stuffed with hundred year old items: baseball mitts from 1900, tools, paintings, clothing, furniture, fireplace mantles, stained glass windows and books!
I just emptied the basement! I whined. Through Navy-seal like self-control, I stayed home. If I stepped foot in that house that I’d come out needing a U-Haul and be right back to where I started with the basement filled, just waiting for the next downpour.
But it didn’t stop me from picking when it was all over.
The first pick up was this set from our old friends at Funk & Wagnall’s (Remember the dictionary? Read it here!) 1919 set of essays from The Great War.
The bindings are splintering, the leather rubbing off and twice I’ve packed them up and brought them to the curb for garbage collection…and twice I’ve turned right around and put them back in the house.
This French/German translator from one of the World Wars. All the American and French Cornet men were in the wars. One uncle in his early twenties was lined up in a German firing squad. The bullets flew, but all missed their mark on Cornet, who managed to escape. A week later his hair was completely white.
And a 16-mm reel titled Jacques and Marie’s Wedding 1930. I had it converted to flash drive. Here is a clip below and just look at the cars!
Here’s Madeleine going to our senior prom in 1992 in a dress from the Roaring ‘20s, still the best prom dress I’ve ever seen. And even though I’m in this yard somewhere, I won’t post a photo of me. I don’t want that many unsubscribers.
But the best were these two volumes of home medical books called Wood’s Household Practice of Medicine, copyrighted in 1879. For the historical fiction writer, a gold mine of medical knowledge in the Victorian era.
These books deserve their own post, which I will get to at some point, but for now, I am deeply grateful to have a piece of a family home that stood for generations. Leaving a childhood home is difficult enough, especially when, as Madeleine’s house was, a happy home well loved by generations and all who visited.
I eventually worked my way out of that unshakable sadness. Well-meaning friends had many explanations. Hormones! Menopause will make you psycho! Turning fifty! At then end, it was the acceptance that loss is inevitable, and what we know intellectually doesn’t prepare us for losing people who are special to us. Marcus Aurelius and his momento mori be damned. Sometimes it’s nice to think we’ll live forever. When I was packing those Parliaments in the ‘90s I thought so.
This post is dedicated to B.W. I’ll see you again someday.
GRACIAS
GRACIASN