Cranky Is The New Perky

Archive for the ‘Nostalgia is my drug of choice’ Category

‘cause an 80’s revival won’t stop (thanks Belgian Waffle for getting that song stuck in my head). 

My lovely friend who I will call by one of her fond nicknames Marzipan, or Mars for short (not that she is saccharine sweet or composed of almond paste) sent me an email showing rompers.  For women.  In dreaded terry even (I haven’t the courage to go back and confirm this).  I won’t name the company as they will probably sue me and we would lose our new hitch hauler and my spouse would be most unhappy.  Let us just say they are called “City-type Clothing-purveyors”.  I retaliated in this fashion war by sending her a link to a pair of white, cigarette cut, calf zip denim capris.  For $178 bucks.  Sadly, I was in a store this weekend wandering around and stroking and looking fondly at the clothes (it’s what I do since I have no actual money to spend) and I saw the dark version of those capri zip jeans.  I was alternately fascinated and repelled and found myself reaching out for them.  “Stop it Jessica” I said (possibly out loud) “You threw these out in 1984 when you went all punk/goth/ whatever.  $178 buck!  Remember the electric bill.  Think of the children.” 

I suspect mine were acid washed, or at least artistically faded.

I am waiting for them to bring back those braided headbands that you wore across your forehead.  I had quite the collection.  I remember one pair that was white leather, white suede, and gold lame.  My mother has a picture of me meeting Coretta Scott King, tragically marred by the fact that I am wearing one of these creations.

And knickers (no, not Brit underpants).  Those cropped pants, often in corduroy, that came to and buttoned under the knee.  Try being an ultra tall, bean pole skinny, white chick on the #96 or the #70 bus and see what the comedians of the back row (every bus has them along with the same soda bottle that has been rolling around in the back for decades) do to you.  I recall them asking when the Mayflower was coming (among other things).

I know everything comes around again, and nostalgia is my drug of choice, but as much as I enjoy reliving the past I also like moving forward.  I have several large boxes of letters, cards, photos, journals that have made every move with me.  Most (all except 1 new one) of my friends are from elementary school to the college years.  I love Facebook because it has enabled me to find and reconnect with certain people again.  But like all real friendships the conversations can continue off the webpage and into real life.  Some of them I will be seeing in the flesh this summer.  And those who are farther away I will be visiting as soon as I can.

I went to DC to see The Damned in May – birthday celebration graciously provided by Mars and P.  and Mars was on her East Coast tour (slogan to be announced).  At the show Mars and I were obnoxious lunatics, not drunk on alcohol as much as adrenaline and joy and the sheer perversity of us and the way we egg each other on.  It was great seeing so many people who had not aged or changed for the worse.  Being back in a dark, noisy (no longer smoky) club felt as real and natural as my day to day life and job.  Considering I spent the formative years of 16-28 in clubs listening to loud music it should.  I was ecstatically, brilliantly happy.  It wasn’t reliving the past that made me euphoric – it was reconnecting and the possibility of all the shared future memories.  The past is inspiration and not the endpoint.

            

We traffic in nostalgia around here.  If you have come for shiny quips about modern parenthood, you have come to the wrong blog.  Not that there is anything wrong with stories of parenting.  It’s just that I spend so much time being consumed by and obsessed with my kids that I need a place where it is all about me.

My mind, which has never been good with dates, facts and reality, can’t quite grasp that Memorial Day weekend is almost here.  This means several days with the kids at the beach.  I will be hiding under the beach umbrella religiously applying SPF60 or higher while languidly watching the children and hoping they don’t caught in a rip tide or beat each other bloody with sand shovels.

The last time I tanned I was 14 and I got it up to a burnished copper hue.  We were in Cape May, my friends and their parents who were friends with my parents.  My parents came briefly and left quickly.  They rented restored Victorian houses on quiet streets – it was like Capitol Hill with an ocean front.  All the girls shared a room, clothes, makeup, sometimes secrets.

We gang of girls were obsessed with boys and the holy grail of a beach romance.  Well, they were obsessed, I was terrified of any boy who wasn’t a childhood friend and therefore automatically a eunuch.

The most successful at this boy thing was Cat.  She was (still is) beautiful with peaches and cream skin and ever-changing blue green eyes.  She was a dead ringer for Lady Di and played it up by getting her signature haircut.  She hit puberty way before me and at 13 had actual breasts which caused me to gaze wistfully at my so flat it is almost concave chest.  Cat could also actually talk to boys with confidence and skill while I always blushed, stammered, and drooled on myself.

We spent the cooling summer evenings walking back and forth on the boardwalk to the arcades that anchored each end.  We looked at boys also travelling in packs, they looked at us, and no contact was made.  Cat was the first to break through – she met a boy named Rob with feathered hair like Shaun Cassidy.  From him we learned many things: that tourists were despised and called Shoobees and that the dunes next to the arcade were the make out point.  Soon Cat and Rob were going out and spent many nights in the dunes while we remaining girls wandered around sadly, spending hours racking up skeeball tickets to be redeemed for glass animals or statues of ponies or kittens.

And then one night I met a boy named Emmett at the skeeball machines.  He was polite and friendly and I was able to talk to him without brushing bright red or making random noises meant to be conversation.  He asked if he could take me out the next night.

He showed up the next day and the adults were fascinated by his good manners in coming in to pick me up and making polite remarks.  They ragged on Cat as Rob used to come by on his bike and shout up or throw pebbles very inaccurately at her window.  He was from the south and soft-spoken and had good manners. 

I don’t remember much of the evening – we ate somewhere, had ice cream, and then slowly progressed toward the make out dunes. 

When we got there I stopped him.  I had something very important to ask him before we went any further.  He was from Georgia and my impression from growing up in DC Public Schools from the stories I heard was that all white southerners were card carrying Klan Members.  I had seen the life and times of Miss Jean Brodie twice.  Looking deep into his eyes (thankfully he was taller than me) I asked him gently if he was a racist.  No, he said, not put off by my question, he was on the basketball team and all his teammates were black and he couldn’t get by in the world if he disliked black people.

We got that out of the way and got done to kissing.  I had been kissed once in a closet during an afterschool game of spin the bottle and I regret to say my instinctive reaction was to knee that guy in the groin.  But this was real kissing, nice kissing, now I knew what they talked about in books.

I only saw him a few more nights and then we had to leave.  I traded in my winnings for a china dog of uncertain parentage and headed back to DC. 

But every year when summer starts I think of my one summer romance and how I learned to kiss.

            

Today I went with my seven year old (and his second grade class) to the Natural History Museum in D.C.   We had a perfect day:  dinosaurs, bugs, ice cream, climbing on the big rocks outside.  There was a great forensic anthropology exhibit but he dragged me away from it.  He loves me with an intensity and a calculated winsomeness that makes me think someday he is going to make a Freudian psychologist very, very rich.

I grew up walking to the Smithsonian museums on hot, aimless summer days.  There was an exhibit on cultural body modifications in the dusty corners of Natural History that used to repel and fascinate us for hours. 

When it snowed we used to go sledding on the Capitol grounds.  We didn’t have sleds so we borrowed the neighbor’s trashcan lids to use as saucers.  We hid from the Capitol Police in the bushes when they made their rounds.  Anecdotally, they were more tolerant in the Carter years, more authoritarian in the Reagan years.

The spring break I was 16 we spent every night swimming in fountains.  We would spend the night at Becky’s house.  When her parents had gone to bed we would slip downstairs to the kitchen one by one and out the silently sliding back kitchen window.  At the end of the alleyway we would meet the rest of our group (I could roll call, you know who you are).

Our spot was the fountains on the side plaza between the Capitol and Union Station.  There is a long reflecting pool, stagnant and mossy, that we swam in fully clothed for hours.  There is a fountain built into the wall facing that had stacked rocks we climbed on.  The best fountain is on the higher level, an elaborate centerpiece with changing colored lights.  We would lie on the grass to dry out and go home at 5 am, our clothes clinging to us.  There was always a moment when I eased the kitchen window open, perched on the window ledge before climbing in, listening for movement in the house, that gave me the first (of many) tastes of illicit, adrenaline pumping thrill.

On the bus ride out, even New York Avenue in its grubby glory of used car lots and metal barricaded storefronts was beautiful to me today.