The carousel is a time machine
Hello!
That’s me up there.
This morning I woke up to a text from my father, who was probably feeling a bit nostalgic. He sent that photograph, and wrote:
On our way to Alaska, early November, 1980. Miss these days!
I recognized the feeling. Saved on my phone are a number of old photos and videos of Squish. She enjoys watching them as much as Felicia and I do. Some of the things little Squish says in these videos are now inside jokes in our family.
Dad kept writing:
Look at the hood, by your right ankle. There’s a gash where the bicycle rack shook loose and gouged the hood. We were in Gallup, New Mexico, on vacation in 1979. I bought a cap from Gurley Motors. Still have it!
In one of the videos I’ve saved, three-year-old Squish is taking song requests. I ask her to sing one about Jessie and Woody, the Toy Story characters whose figures are clutched in her little hands right then:
Woody, Jessie
They’re, they’re both never give up!
The end
Dad’s still going:
Those were innocent years full of mystery and adventure. That was “my truck”! Family! Future!
In November 1980, I was a little more than two years old. We were in the midst of relocating from Houston, Texas, to Anchorage, Alaska. My folks tell all sorts of stories about this particular road trip, but none more than the one about how, somewhere in Canada, deep in the night, I got sick in the truck as they struggled to find a place we could all sleep. As Dad parked the truck in a motel parking lot, I threw up all over the interior. He and my mother looked at one another, too tired to deal with the mess, and left it ‘til morning. The next morning, the problem had solved itself. They chipped the frozen mess off the dashboard and floorboards, swept the shards out of the pickup, and we continued on our merry way.
That’s a gross story, I know, but in my family it’s considered somewhat charming, I think?
In the same video, shot by yours truly, I ask Squish if she’ll sing a song about one of her current favorite movie characters, the Iron Giant. Without hesitating, she improvises:
IRON GIANT
He has a big giant body
And he has a big giant hands
When she trails off, I ask her if there’s more.
“Hogarth,” she says, referring to the little boy who befriends the Iron Giant, “a little body, and little hands. And tall Mommy, and…”
She trails off again, and then abruptly breaks into song:
Hogarth
Has a tiny body
And Mama
Has a tall body
And she has
A tall hands
I asked my dad if he had any contingency plans when he packed his family into a pickup truck and drove three thousand miles to a much colder, unfamiliar state. He’d accepted a programming job with the National Bank of Alaska. What would he have done if the job didn’t pan out? I told him I couldn’t imagine there was a large computer programming market in Anchorage back then.
No contingency. I was determined to stay in Alaska one way or the other.
We lasted until 1986, and when we left, it had nothing to do with Dad’s job. We returned to Texas to be near family again, but it was not meant to be. We stuck it out for years, though, most of them living in my father’s childhood home in Channelview. After a couple of brief moves, in 1994 we finally packed a U-Haul and struck out once more for Anchorage.
Also among the videos of little Squish is one that she and I recorded for Felicia. At the time, Felicia was back in California, attending Stitches West with friends.
Squish was about two-and-a-quarter then, adorable and giggly and amped up by avoiding bedtime. I held the phone up, recording video, and asked her to give Mama a bedtime message. Squish spent half the video singing like a little opera star instead.
“Let’s tell Mama we miss her,” I say.
“We miss you,” Squish dutifully says.
“Let’s say it with heart,” I tell her. In the saddest voice I can conjure, I say, “We miss you.” Squish repeats after me. “Come home quickly, we need hugs so badly.”
“We— We-we-we need hugs so baaaaaadly,” Squish emotes.
To this day, Felicia can hardly watch this video. It triggers two built-in responses: One is the my kiddo needs me pang that every mother knows so well; the other is the I have abandoned my kiddo guilt trip that every mother has probably also experienced when taking a moment for themselves.
By contrast, the video that Felicia and Squish recorded when I was away from home is emotionally flat, in the most hilarious way. Squish is four, and has her chin propped in her hand as she gives the camera a blase look.
“Goodnight,” Squish says.
There’s a long silence.
“What else?” Felicia prompts.
“I love you,” Squish says, as if the thought has only just occurred to her.
“And?” Felicia asks.
Squish contemplates this for a long moment.
”…So much,” she says, finally.
“And?” Felicia nudges. “Do you miss him?”
“I miss you,” Squish says, deadpan.
“Tell Daddy goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
I texted my father and asked him how things had worked out for him. Were his years of mystery and adventure worth it?
No regrets. A good epithet for a headstone.
Let the record show my father has asked for epithets in his epitaph.
Then I texted him back: I just realized that photograph was forty years ago.
Yep. Your fortieth year since moving to Alaska. Your sister will be forty in July. Lots of forties!
I can hardly imagine what the world will look like when Squish is forty. When she is, I’ll be…seventy-three years old. If I’m not still around, she’ll have my journals to prowl through if she ever wants to understand what made me tick. Today’s entry was basically Still not sleeping well. I’m hungry. Such detail to unpack.
When Dad texted me the photo, Felicia and Emma had already started the day’s distance learning. I texted it to Felicia.
She texted back:
I definitely see Emma in this picture.
A few nights ago, Felicia and I sat talking, and she said she’s been grateful to realize that, even after more than a year of being shut in, just the four of us (Felicia’s mother lives with us, too), she enjoys her family’s company. Spending all that time cooped up together, mostly indoors, always isolated, hasn’t burned us out on one another. We all still get along, maybe even better now than we did.
This week, because we’re part of a multi-generational home, we became eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Felicia and her mother had their first dose yesterday; I’ll have mine this weekend. We’re a step closer to feeling a little safer, relieved and yet also vigilant.
Each evening, when our respective days have wound down, Felicia and I spend a little time just with each other. We talk about our days—mine spent working remotely, or writing; hers spent guiding Squish through the third grade via Zoom, and exercising, or knitting, or baking—but more often than not, we wind up watching those beloved old videos of our daughter.
One of the most beloved episodes of Mad Men is called “The Carousel.” It’s the season one finale, and in it, Don Draper must pitch to a couple of clients from Kodak. The Kodak boys have invented a donut-shaped slide projector, and it needs a name, and a good ad campaign. They’ve been calling it ‘the wheel,’ for lack of a name, and they recognize that wheels are hard to sell, being the original technology, and being quite old.
Here’s the scene, if you’re so inclined.
“There’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash,” Don says to the clients, “if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”
He tells the clients that his first job was an in-house copywriting gig at a fur company, working with an old pro, a Greek man named Teddy. “He talked about a deeper bond with the product: Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.”
The lights go down, and Don begins showing slides of his own family photos.
“Teddy told me that, in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound,’” he continues. “It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
As he cycles through photographs of his children growing up, of his wedding, Don says, “This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
The slide show approaches the end. “It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we were loved.”
As my father gets older, his nostalgia deepens. He’s always valued memories, childhood relationships, distant family connections, in a way that I don’t. He grew up in the middle of a large family, with many cousins all around. For awhile, I did, too, but, you know, Alaska, then Texas, then Alaska again. It’s easy to lose track, and as adults, everyone has their own lives, their own loops to get lost in.
He collects just about anything with the Gurley name on it. I haven’t done that. Lately, though, I confess I’ve been nostalgic for the baseball cards I collected as a kid. Particularly those bearing the image of Darryl Strawberry, my favorite player in those days. I couldn’t touch Strawberry’s rookie cards back then, but you’d find them all on a shelf in my study now.
But I do share a father’s nostalgia for this little family that’s formed around me and Felicia. I think all the time about where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, what’s next for us all.
This afternoon Felicia shared this photo with me:
She took that photo on February 27, 2020, the last time we were together with my folks. Squish has missed her grandparents dearly, so they make do with regular FaceTime dates. Sometimes those calls go for hours. Mom and Dad are both vaccinated now, thank goodness, and sometime this year we’ll finally all get to see one another again.
Nostalgia’s taken on such a different meaning in the last year.
All right, that’s all for now. Thanks for wandering down this ribbon of memory with me. I hope you’re all safe, continuing to take precautions, vaccinated or on the verge.
A bit of housekeeping: Buttondown, the service I use to send these letters, has introduced a pay-what-you-want subscription model, letting subscribers support writers on their own terms. What do you think about that?
✏️ Until the next time,
Jg