Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
While cfk is out sick, some of us are trying to help fill in the Bookflurries diaries. Cfk, we miss you and hope you get better!
I'm 63. One thing I have discovered as I get older is the bursts of memories of things long past. Funny things can set me off. Like an empty Coke bottle. I felt tempted the past two weeks to bid on one of these. Only tempted, though.
It's just an empty bottle, but to me, seeing it triggered a stunning series of very, very old memories. Back when I was a kid, Coke came in two green glass bottles: 6½ ounce bottles and 12 ounce bottles. And that was ALL. The real gem was that 6½ oz. bottle. They don't make those anymore. They were more attractive than the tall skinny larger bottles because of the more exaggerated curves.
I used to buy these at the store, or from Coke machines. Coca Cola had its own big red vending machines located strategically. Some of them sold nothing but the 6½ oz. bottles, a big row of them, no other sodas. They had a bottle opener next to the coin return so you could pry off the tin and cork bottle top. And I remember the ecstasy of a cold 6½ oz. Coke on hot days. I'm unclear on all the details of how and why, but they really were better than their 12 oz. cousins. I think that because they were smaller, they didn't have as much time to go flat at the end. And maybe I'm wrong, but they seemed much more fizzy from the moment they were opened.
Oftentimes, the bottle tops were part of an advertising campaign, like collect all the 50 states bottle tops. I had a map of the US from Coca Cola on which you could glue the appropriate state bottle top. I ended up very disillusioned by it because I kept buying Coke and getting the same damn states. It was one of my first disappointments with mass marketing bullshit. Isn't that a precious memory?
When I stumbled across the empty coke bottle (I wasn't really searching for it) on ebay, I was stopped in my tracks. I wished I could just hold it in my hands, to KNOW THAT ALL THOSE MEMORIES WERE REAL, that the different world it came from really existed at one time, that I had been in it, and that it is gone forever. I feel a bittersweet sense of loss and awe over it.
Yet just twenty years ago, I would have looked at that bottle and seen junk for the recycle bin. The memories hadn't had time to properly ferment. Now, it triggers a chain reaction of feelings that just keep going. Coke after school while waiting for the bus. My older brother fighting with me over sharing one. One particular hot day, sitting on my new ten speed outside a Savon, with the air conditioning blasting me every time the electric door opened and closed. Now I remember my bike. It was painted green metal fleck, and had green plastic wrapping around the handles. I remember the bike store, how it smelled like grease and rubber, how it was next door to a hobby shop that sold CO² canisters we kids used to make model cars blast off. And that triggers all my memories of getting in trouble for my mischievous experiments.
I've had books trigger very old memories as well. One of my earliest book memories must be really, really old. I was probably 3 or 4. I had a children's story book, racist as all fuck, called Little Black Sambo. I found two different versions online, but I won't link to them for propriety's sake.
I recall carrying the book around and asking my mother to read it to me again, and her usually saying no, but I also remember her reading it to me. The softness of her voice. The bed we layed in together. Blue paint on the walls. A window on the south side of the room, and the bed situated right up against it. The wooden floors. My mom is 100 years old now, literally; it's a trip to suddenly remember her voice when she was young. This memory is probably from around 1959, 1960. I doubt I knew it at the time, but Eisenhower was president.
That's old, old shit, eh?
I think it was the fifth grade when I started reading library books that weren't mostly pictures. I checked out classics, rather than the beginner stuff. The first one. I remember checking out was Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. Then Tom Sawyer, then Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), then Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Robinson Crusoe was HARD reading. It still is. I reread it again a few years ago and loved it, but I found the 17th century language still daunting. I recall that when I read it, it was just about the biggest large scale project I had ever undertaken and finished, and I was proud of myself for finishing it. I got into a fortunate habit which lasted me decades of always finishing books, no matter how chorish it became.
Tom Sawyer was FUN. Huckleberry Finn was more work. And it's arguably racist AF with frequent use of the N-word. It seems you couldn't throw a dart in Madison Elementary's school library without hitting something racist.
Rereading Huckleberry Finn as an adult was a mind opener. As a child when Huck helped smuggle N-word Jim downriver, I was petrified with fear that Huck was going to get in BIG TROUBLE for it if he was discovered. That is the way a ten year old reads the book. As an adult reading it, the POV trick of having a ten year old kid narrate his story as a ten year old would stood out. Huck has to do personal soul-searching about people owning other people, but he does it as a ten year old would. There were two books in Huck Finn, one I wasn't ready to read. I strongly recommend everybody try reading Huck Finn both ways.
Some books aren't nostalgic triggers, but they still wallow in nostalgia. Ray Bradbury is a great wallower. His book Dandelion Wine recalls in exquisite detail some of his experiences as a youth in 1928. That is way too far back to trigger any memories of my own, but the way Bradbury focuses on his stories, including extraneous details, tells us this is Bradbury's own transcendental reliving of his own 6½ ounce Coke bottle.
I know some of you don't like Stephen King. Well, I do. Some of his books depend on nostalgia. His 1986 book IT is a horror story, but it's also a huge nostalgia trip for people who grew up in the 1950s. The boys in IT were born about ten years earlier than me, but I've long been hypnotized by the similar memories in it.Like the Barrens, the abandoned field and creek that figures prominently. I had my own field as a kid. It's now Forest Lawn Lakewood cemetery. In the early 60s, it was just a field that used to be a marsh where we Boomer kids (there were a lot of us) could get into trouble. Many impromptu clubhouses were founded in that field. The field was full of non-poisonous snakes and frogs and rabbits. Many of them became victims of slingshots and BB guns. There were also hidden caches of Playboy magazines and French postcards and baseball cards and monster cards and cigarettes. (French postcards really were a thing). One time, a bitter nine year old gang fight broke out when my friends stumbled across a cache belonging to other kids about a quarter mile away from us. We kept their stuff despite threats of beatings, because who could they complain to? Our parents? Uh huh. It was a vital moral lesson for them. It's hard to imagine pre-pubescent kids today fighting over illicit softcore porn the way we did.
Upcoming Bookflurries diarists: Sept. 9th — Emmet Sept. 16th — bonetti
Recovery is an wayward and contingent path. We can’t be sure when cfk will be ready to write more Bookflurries diaries. So if, dear reader, you want to help by volunteering to write a Bookflurries diary on Sept. 23rd or 30th — then please say so in a comment below; or kosmail Brecht, who’s coordinating this series while cfk’s away. Thank you all.
So, I will end things here. Are there any books (or any things) that trigger reveries for you?
