Like a record, baby

I'm always imagining the past. Sometimes I think about the recent past -- that is, my past -- but mostly I think about times Long Ago.

It started after the birth of my first child. I'd sit in my rocking chair nursing him, alone in the dark night. Rock, rock. It was a pleasant but lonely moment; so I was always imagining other women in other times who had nursed their children, too.

I most liked to imagine the flood of the Black Sea 7000 years ago, which I'd seen on TV. I'd conjure a young woman -- much younger than me but, given the times, probably entering the second trimester of her life, just like me -- sitting alone on a rock nursing her child and watching the sea rise. She would be full of awe and fear. She would wonder what kind of world her child would live to see. Would the waters recede again? Or would she and her child have to forge a new life? My son was born three months after the Twin Trade Towers fell, so you can see why this story appealed to me.

I don't have those silent nursing sessions anymore, but I still imagine other women's lives. Yesterday morning I woke and walked downstairs to the kitchen, which we had picked up (all leftovers put into the 'fridge) but not cleaned. Within a second's span I had thought of the family that housed me in Moscow 17 years ago and the way that woman cleaned up every single crumb, all day long, to deter cockroaches, and how lucky I am that cockroaches don't live in Bend; and then I felt grateful for the dishwasher, which had so quietly and uncomplainingly cleaned my dishes while I slept, and I thought about my mother's mother and all those other generations of women who did not have dishwashers to help them.

At other moments I'll wonder how women cooked over an open fire. I'll think about how, without a stereo in their living rooms, women must have sang a lot. I'll think about how extended families of women used to work together (this while I wish for someone to show me how to make jam), and I wonder whether they liked that or didn't. I'll think about how American settlers had no other women to talk to for weeks on end. I also think about the Paiutes (who lived here, in Central Oregon) using obsidian knives and digging sticks.

It's not an obsession. It's a passing fancy -- a second's worth of thought -- not even a daydream. It certainly affects my response to current events, though. And my opinion of my life.

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This is Seth Cotlar writing about nostalgia in the spring issue of Oregon Humanities: "Over time we became more accustomed to the uncertainty and turbulence that accompanies the incessant newness of modern life. We have, to varying degrees, come to accept the inevitable fact that what lies ahead of us will differ dramatically from what came before. ...We moderns know that the unique material and human context that formed us, that made us who we are, will before long cease to exist in any recognizable form. ...The passage of time in modern societies has an annoying tendency to sever whatever connections we might form to the objects and people that are meaningful to us."

Which makes me wonder if the way that I see the past everywhere is nostalgia: a search for continuity in a changing landscape. And its discovery.

*

Time seems to me not linear but spiral-shaped. Everything comes back around -- not back to where it started, not full circle, but nearby, so that you can sense it.