The thing about my childhood is that
I don't remember it. I mean, I remember a few things--
I'm not suffering from amnesia, like a character in
a soap opera who returns to Pleasant Grove having had
his entire memory somehow knocked loose in the plane
crash, at which time, coincidentally, he also suffered
injuries requiring plastic surgery that gave him the
face of a different actor.
As glamorous and exciting as that possibility
might seem, I am forced to concede that, once one factors
in the ravaging effects of a quarter century of dissipation,
my own face does seem more or less to match that of
the surly-looking child portrayed in family photographs.
(Actually, to get a really good match, one has to factor
in the ravaging effects of a half century of
dissipation, which I realize is about twice as much
as the calendar requires, but I've always been something
of a prodigy when it comes to dissipation and ravagement.)
And in any case, I do remember just enough to put paid to any such glamorous conspiracy theories. I know what town I lived in, for example (I still have the T-shirt somewhere), and I'm pretty sure that, with a little effort and a few discreet phone calls, I could tell you my parents' names. But that's about it. I can only goggle, stupefied with envy and disbelief, at the long, incredibly detailed, Joycean reminiscences of youth so effortlessly tossed off in the works of our better (and even many of our not-so-better) authors.
Any bookstore, even the one in that decaying strip mall at the edge of town that hasn't been the same since they put the new highway through, is hip-deep with these offhand feats of mnemonic legerdemain. These writers might as well be producing a full-grown Bengal tiger from a snuffbox for all the hope I have of duplicating their efforts. It really is impossible: Look; here, we find the complete menu of the family Christmas dinner in New Hampshire where Father finally confessed that he was ruined financially, and that future Christmases would be spent in a yurt behind the bowling alley. Here, we learn precisely how Grandmother's petticoats smelled on the morning of the fateful day when the class bully finally got his comeuppance. And here again, a lingering, tender description of a forbidden pubescent tryst; how our hero plucked each bit of straw from a distant cousin's hair as a yellow shaft of late-afternoon sunlight peeped through the decaying roof of the disused barn to bathe her face in an impossible radiant glow, how time seemed to stand still, how he will seek to recapture this perfect moment, sometimes consciously and sometimes without even really realizing it, forever after.
If anything like any of the above ever happened to me, I don't
remember it. Here's what I do remember: I was born (actually,
I don't remember this, but I feel fairly confident reconstructing
it); at some point my mother complained that the seafood
at Red Lobster was rubbery from having sat on the steam
table for too long; and then I went to college. If you
think I'm going to have a tough time translating that
into a modern A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,
well, brother, you're not alone.
And yet. It's funny that you should mention Proust (oh, was it me? well, whatever), because, in spite of the above, I'm sure that, given the right combination of circumstances, the appropriate ratio of Vat 69 to secobarbital, and a well-placed blow to the head with any of seven clothbound volumes of the reminiscences of a certain long-winded French autobiographer, these memories of which I speak-- those which are to me at this moment, as I've said, a sealed book-- are capable of tumbling unbidden into the forebrain, to be examined and wondered at anew in shocking (and often humiliating) detail. They're in there; it's just a matter of getting them out.
I believe that, to a greater or lesser
degree, the same is true for all of us. Though as I've
said, I consider myself deafer to the muffled cries
of the long-imprisoned past than most, even I have,
on occasion, swung a half-hearted pickax into the stone
wall of forgetfulness only to surprise myself by miraculously
and unrepeatably exposing a perfectly preserved, fossilized
recollection, which, had I even known it existed, I
would have presumed lost forever a moment before.
It is this sort of serendipitous archaeology of the mind which this magazine hopes to facilitate. Each month, more or less, the editors of Lime Tea will take a break from idly torturing metaphors to present some of the best writers no money can buy with a word, phrase, or concept-- a theme, if you want to be pedestrian about it. The hope is that our writers can use this fragment of whatever-it-is as a sort of mnemonic blasting cap, detonating it to expose the buried wonders that lurk in the dank, uncharted caverns of the dead past. (I know you probably wouldn't want to set off real blasting caps in a real dank, uncharted cavern, because the roof would probably collapse and you'd be buried alive in the rubble, but this is just a metaphor, so calm down.) These buried wonders will then be stuffed, mounted, labeled, catalogued, and presented here for your enjoyment.
Of course, when you go fishing with dynamite, you have to expect a somewhat varied catch. We know that not everything we'll find floating belly-up after the blast will be a memoir. In this first issue, for example, we've skimmed fiction, essays, and the odd manifesto from the turbid waters of our conceptual sinkhole. We're hoping that it will all fit together in some strange, pre-logical fashion; and even if it doesn't, we'll say that it did.
In any case, enjoy this traveling exhibition of mounted fossils, stuffed wonders, and dead fish. And you thought it was just a collection of stories. Frankly, so did I. I should have known those metaphors would find a way to get even with me someday.
Marty Smith is the Editor of
Lime Tea. He has been mentioned in The New
York Times twice, once for pissing off arch-conservative
William Bennett and once for pissing off arch-liberal
Ralph Nader. Marty makes the observation that you can't
win from his home in Portland, OR.
