Lost and Not Lost

The internet is an amazing tool for obliterating the barrier between ourselves and the past.  It's rather a terrifying one for obliterating barriers between people (there are friends and others from my youth it took me many years to manage to lose touch with, and it is a little daunting to realize just how easy it is for that effort to go for naught, these days), for creating personal and financial vulnerability, for learning things it once might have been impossible to ever find.  For reunion with memories long past.

I did something this past week which represents both something I find kind of mystifyingly wonderful, and which also in a way goes against (some of) my beliefs.


I saw a photo of a weir the other day, and was brought to mind of the source from which I learned the word.  It was a book about a British boy, coming of age, and growing in friendship and attachment to an elusive girl he saw when exploring a weir out in the country.  The book was called The Otherwise Girl - something I'm pretty sure I bought at a library booksale when I was twelve or so - and one of those books I read at an age, and IN an age, when reading could still be so intimate and so singular an experience that it felt nobody else in the world could have ever known the story.

Reading was not, in the 1970s, especially for kids, really a blockbuster experience.  YA lit was backwater stuff, not the driving force in the publishing market it is today.  Until I discovered "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret" and S. E. Hinton, I was unaware of anything I had ever read (other than the Bible) which had ever been read by anyone else.  And so books, for me, were an extraordinarily personal adventure.  Every story I had ever read was, for me, precisely and wholly my own object and memory.  I still write as if, all marketing notwithstanding, my work is unheard and unseen, existing only for one reader - for myself - or for some imagined fourteen-year-old-boy staying for a summer at his great aunt's, who discovers this dusty old thing on a bookshelf and reads it, and somehow loves it.

What I mean to say with all this is that  The Otherwise Girl  represents something of a personal genre, a story only I have ever known, and which, because I lost it decades since, was one of the beautiful ephemera of the universe.  In some way, that enhances its strength and its appeals, its soft lines and gentle lessons, its eerie loveliness.  Its absence, like that of my youth itself, is a part of what underscores its place in my heart ...

The Otherwise Girl is, of course, not the only story of its kind for me.  The Underside of the Leaf is another.  A seamier tale.  A memory of reading something, still back in grade school - I must have been about eleven - which seemed shocking and almost forbidden.  These coming of age stories came when I was very young - before the modernity of Judy Blume, or the edgy sixties-hip of Hinton's Outsiders.  They came before I even aspired to literary sophistication, when I was very much a little kid.  They came to me utterly innocent, and told me tales both of sweetness and of tasted sorrow.  I recall, from Leaf, the intensity of feeling I had about a girl liking a boy who somewhat frightened her.  I recall a description of his sweater.

It's never occurred to me to attempt to recapture these fragments, the flotsam of a childhood I bless but am content to know has been decades-since left behind.


***


And yet.

This past week, I ordered copies of both these books.  The picture of the weir did it - and got me looking, too, at Madeleine L'Engle too (great books, and fantastic, gripping titles).  I went to Amazon to buy the Book of Common Prayer I've had on my list for a bit now - and ended up coming away with these two, too.

Otherwise has arrived already.  It is the same edition I had then; a blue upon blue turquoise cover.  A girl in shorts.  A ghostly reverse image.


I wonder whether generations since my own will ever even have the opportunity for loss like this, the kind of progress through life that shapes my own entire existence, the kind of irretrievability which overrides free will and exerts itself merely by dint of time.  Life isn't the quiet backwater it once was, and I wonder what the experience will mean for my nieces - for the marvelousness that is nostalgia, the beauty of sentiment, with its ghost of melancholy making it such a beautiful feeling.

I try not to feel generationally superior - that These Kids Today have lost the very experience of loss.

But I do wonder.  Ephemerality is at the core of life's urgency and emotionality.  Being able to order up one's own preadolescence for home delivery is both wonderful ... and itself almost wistful.  I won't recapture the girl I was thirty and more years back.

And yet.

I never lost her, either.  She's still such a part of the woman I am day to day.  And if I didn't bless the fact I could give her a little nibble - could find these memories at all - I would not have placed that order.

I believe in the impenetrability of lost youth.  But I also believe in the joyousness of memory.  And reading.