Memory Lane

Friday, 18 October

“An imaginary path through the nostalgically remembered past,” is how Merriam- Webster Dictionary defines Memory Lane. Though I was on a real path – a two-week trip to the US – it often felt imagined. Or like a dream, where remembered places are both familiar and foreign and certainly infused with nostalgia. It's what happens when you've been away for a long time, when your mind has no new memories to fill in the gaps.

The trip, time with family and friends dotted with readings from my recently published novel Civilisation Française, was my first across the Atlantic in five years – since my last novel (The Art of Regret) came out pre-Covid.

The starting point was Connecticut, where my sister Catharine moved in 2019. Her new home has echoes of the place in western Massachusetts where my parents moved in the early 1980s. Similarly situated down a track and in the woods, the house has some of their furniture, art and knickknacks, even the same smell. As my husband David remarked: “It’s like your parents’ but nicer [ie, not hermetically sealed and smothered under trees].” So it was like going back...but not.

One day Catharine bought a bag of the ultra-processed, vaguely corn-based snack Bugles, what used to accompany our hot dogs when we were children, and I had a full-blown madeleine moment.

During the Connecticut stay, I drove to my old boarding school, Ethel Walkers. They had invited me to spend a day participating in English, French and photography classes, in meetings for the literary magazine and the French club. Late afternoon there was a reading and book signing for faculty, parents and local alumnae.

Here I really had to rub jet-lagged eyes, consider my state of consciousness. Just like one of my recurring dreams, buildings I didn't recognise mingled with the familiar ones. Sports fields had expanded, gone practically pro. The library is now the dining room, and the English class was held in the old art studio. The "butt room" (yes, not only were we allowed to smoke, we had a large room set aside for that purpose, and it was the hub of school social life) has been sectioned into administrative offices.

Next stop was the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia chez Cathy and Jim S. I visited them often during the couple years I lived unhappily in New York. They buoyed me then and did so again these 45 years later.

I got a bit of a breather from my nostalgia-titis in the city of Philadelphia where I had only been once. Other friends, Jessie and Mike B, had corralled their literary friends for an elegant party before my reading at Head House Books, and by the end of the evening I felt quite at home.

Unlike the dazed detachment I felt in New York, despite having lived there. Even the lovely dinner with Michele M, Jean-Marie G and Lily T didn't dispel my disorientation, but the mistake may have been staying in mid-town, where blocks of old, low buildings are being razed and replaced by skinny towers. It felt like a futuristic movie with no place for sensate humans.

Fortunately we were soon in Maine...

...where I went to college and have visited many times. There I saw Helen W, my oldest friend...

...and Megan T, whom I met on the first day at Colby. There weren't enough hours in the days we spent together for us to catch up completely. My reading in Portland at Novel Books Bar & Café, made possible by Megan and her daughter Louisa, was the best attended of them all.

In some ways, the first 12 days of the trip were just a mnemonic warm-up for my return to the source, for my 36 hours in Chicago where memories assaulted me with every step. I was staying a block away from my grandparents' apartment and only a few more from where I grew up.

I had friends or schoolmates in three of the surrounding buildings in the above photo; the fourth (right foreground) wasn't there. Every Saturday morning, I'd sit on the window ledge behind the curtains in the living room and look at Lake Michigan (background), watch the traffic on Lake Shore Drive. Later I'd walk or ride my bike down this beach...

...play field hockey in this corner of Lincoln Park.

The old hood seemed more pristine than in my day. Gaudy Square, then not much more than a patch of dirt where we played dodgeball after school, is a manicured, safely-equipped recreational area enclosed by a spiked black iron fence. The sidewalks, where on my way home from Helen's I would hop around acrobatically, trying not to "Step on a crack, break your mother's back", are now smooth and fissure-free.

My last reading was at The Book Cellar, located in a now gentrified area of the city way to the north, unfamiliar territory to me.

Except it wasn't unfamiliar because Ali P, Alice and Billy H, Lynn and Brooke H were there. Catharine had come from Connecticut.

There's more to Memory Lane than geography. It's just as much the people who have marked your path along the way. What a good trip I had.

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