Analog Dreams: Reflections on 40

If you've ever stretched the cord of the kitchen wall phone past the Harvest Gold appliances into the bathroom so as to have a private phone conversation: you are analog.

If you've ever fiddled with the round part of the rabbit ears to get better UHF reception for the afternoon Prize Movie when you played sick from school: you are analog.

If your Mom ever taped a dime to your mitten so you could call her from the Sparkle Market pay phone when you finished painting your Park and Rec Halloween mural on the dentist's office window with poster paints: you are analog.

If, inspired by R2D2's projection of Princess Leia, you ever raced home from the General Cinema at the mall and constructed a robot, with your Viewmaster projector perched atop a torso made of your biggest tub of Lincoln Logs, your Realistic tape recorder providing the voice, rigged up to a motion detector made from your Radio Shack circuit kit, so he spoke to you and projected images of Star Wars onto the wall with his stereoscopic eyes when you entered the room: you are analog.

(Okay, maybe that last one is just me.)

Regardless, we are the analog generation.

If you are of this generation, a John Hughes film of your high school years flickers in a continuous loop somewhere in the back of your head.

And it is most definitely a FILM, slightly scratchy, flecks of dust visible in shafts of projected light. I count among my arcane analog skills that if need be, I could still find my way around a projection booth, successfully spooling a three-reel feature onto dual projectors. The secret is, you unspool an elbow's length of the first reel, mark the celluloid with a white grease pencil, and as the clattering gears of the machine eat the last of reel one, you watch the screen, unblinking, for the flick of your pencil smudge. You then flick off the light of the first projector and flick on the second. With practice and quick reflexes, the effect is seamless. So as not to mar the rented features, I practiced on old strips of coming attractions that were cast about the booth: it is on the the trailers for Let No Man Write My Epitaph that I honed my craft.

 My flickering Hughes film begins with a car scene: a maroon 1984 Ford Escort, my sister's, decorated in unicorns.

We spill out of 1529 7th Street, running late of course, she trailing streamers and ribbons from the paper banners she has to get to school early to decorate her designated football player's locker with. Cheerleading hadn't quite evolved into the athletic endeavor it is today, so although it is the mid-80's, her uniform still has vestiges of a demure 1950s "pom pom" girl: thick wool sweater with turtleneck, short but full wool pleated skirt, white sneakers, bobbie socks (only the year before, and not without some controversy, had the switch been made from saddle shoes to sneakers.) Me: boat shoes, Bugle Boys, department store-brand "Polo" shirt.

We squeal two blocks over tar and gravel streets, past black and gold painted concrete street sign posts, to her friend Kerri's house, where they quickly exchange folded piles of clothes: tomorrow's outfits. Since Kerri attends St. Vincent-St. Mary's on North Hill (LeBron is born right about this time), she and my sister have discovered that they can effectively double their wardrobe of Forenza sweaters and Palmetto jeans by enacting this daily exchange.

Back in the unicorn mobile (unicorn figurines hot glued to the dashboard, a stuffed unicorn hugging the rearview mirror with spring-action legs, an "I HEART Unicorns" license plate strapped to the back bumper), we slow down as we approach Stow Street, AKA "Tiger Lane," and follow the tiger paws painted on the asphalt to the student parking lot. Corey Hart blares from the Escort's speakers, as it does every day: the cassette is permanently lodged in the tape deck. Fortunately, there are half a dozen hits on that tape, and this day, the stars have aligned: "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" blasts at just that moment when we pass the largest throng of denim jacket-clad students milling about.

As if being a lowly freshman being driven to school by your senior sister in full cheerleader regalia were not enough, I adjust my shades, confirm proper collar flippage, and for this one brief moment, am certain, that the intrinsic coolness of Corey's biggest MTV hit has washed me in its glow. My sister gives a quick wave to the genial retiree who mans the parking attendant booth, we score a prime spot. She races off to decorate lockers and make the banner the team will burst through at tonight's pre-game, while I feel my coolness shrink discernibly with each step away from the unicorn mobile, the Corey cassette, and the sympathetic magic of my sister's presence. I quickly unflip the collar, no longer certain I can pull it off...

The more we spin this mortal coil, the more difficult it can be to knit together the divergent strands of a life. Far flung friends, diverse experiences: faded photographs, bits of folded up notebook paper, boxes of archaic diskettes and electronic gear bear witness to the folly of analog remembrance.

We weave what strands we can in our flickering cinematic memories, and, all of a sudden, realize, the bright shining images of our youth have become a period piece. We hear the crackle of the celluloid coiling through the sprockets, see the detritus in the beam of projected light. The colors seem off: here too drab, over there impossibly vivid. We laugh at the hairstyles, the skinny leather ties, the collars flipped up.

 Our cassette tapes have long ago melted in the glovebox of a truck we junked years ago. We find tins of spices on our shelves purchased a decade ago in another state. A coffee ring mars a torn and faded photo of a friend who left us too soon.

This winter of my fortieth year, I'm finding beauty in things that are broken, out of reach, worn, slipping away. Bits of Paradise Lost, half forgotten poems ("we must praise the mutilated world"), sturdy old hymns all rattle the cage, looking for light. This brutal winter slows me down and makes space for introspection, gratitude. These fierce winter days my hands need to write, before it slips away.

Without words, we weave the strands in our flickering filmic memories, and, at times, also, our dreams.

Give her enough time, and Queen Mab will knit the strands for you, while you slumber fast, unaware. You just have to surrender to dream logic, which from time to time, I am willing to do.

Approaching my fortieth year, I labored hard on one of those impossibly long June days. Creative juices flowing, a new project at hand. I built a garden path from rubble: leveled the earth, mixed the concrete, hauled and assembled cast off materials into a thing of utility, pleasing to the eye. Losing my light, I called it a day, and collapsed in a heap of grateful slumber, without removing my concrete caked clothes.

Fourteen hours later I awoke with a start, vivid snippets still projecting in my mind's eye. Impossible circumstances, divergent characters flung together. Details fade rapidly with each blink of sleep encrusted eyes, I struggle for a moment to know where I am. This much, I remember:

 A faded amusement park in the Mahoning Valley. A fun house ride. Above the entrance door, an animatronic gypsy cackles. I share a car with a faded 1970's movie starlet. We whoosh through the curtain, transported to a celestial plane. Everything is cerulean, amber, white, and vivid. Then, before me, a most substantial wood desk, and a stern man behind it. His deportment and grooming suggest a more severe Harry S Truman, his gaze is fierce. I know this man, but cannot place him. He and his desk are in stark black and white against a roiling sky. His silent judgment pierces me. A placard on his desk, instead of "The Buck Stops Here," implores, merely, "THINK." Next thing I know, back on the midway, the smell of soggy french fries in vinegar soaked paper cups mingles with roller coaster axle grease.

Like Ebeneezer after his midnight visitations, I burst to the window, still concrete caked, pleased to see the light of a real day. Still not sure if what I'd seen was real or phantasm, a flicker of what has been or is yet to be, I gaze out the back window: the black oak, the neighbor's clothesline exactly where they should be in the bright morning light. Suddenly, I place the man, from a glossy black and white photo dimly remembered, in my Dad's 1956 yearbook: Gordon M. DeWitt, principal of Cuyahoga Falls High School, who became the namesake of my yet to be built grade school.

Fever pitch analog dreams. The longer we live the more we synthesize. Old black and white photos, half recalled dronings of a pipe organ bellowing a hymn, voices now silenced raised in song:

A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.

 The paper mache brontosaurus you spent weeks crafting in kindergarten is, it turns out, an apatosaurus with the head of a camarasaurus. Pluto is no longer a planet. You spent an entire year mastering looping capital letters in an expert cursive script no one uses anymore. You remember the space shuttle exploding against a cerulean sky and rushing to the bank of pay phones, fumbling for a quarter so you can call a friend to let her know.

Things that are broken. Things that are fading. Things that seemed bright and shiny and never fading now seem impossibly quaint. This is the year, one after the other, my friends roll over the forty year cliff. These are our scars. Like velveteen rabbits only more wrinkled, love and use are what make us real.

We sat in kindergarten, against a projected beam of light in which specks of dust danced. With expert hand Mrs. Burris traces our profiles on black construction paper. I saw those same profiles, in frames over mantles and on stairway walls, in houses on Chestnut and Grant and Seventh and Sixth, whose subjects grew to be teenagers lank haired and gangly, as I rang doorbells to collect money, and record who has paid for what by punching a hole in a set of cards bound together by steel rings: analog, baby. As analog as the thud of a well flung Sunday Beacon Journal hitting blue painted porch planks.

In the period Hughes film of my distant youth, one reel fades seamlessly to the next, grease pencil scribblings barely visible, an expert hand mans the booth. Projected, in pristine black and white, the namesake of my grade school, sent to reassure me, like a benevolent angel from a Capra film, crackles on to the screen. Without saying a word, and yet with excellent diction, he implores: The preparation is over. Life happens now. Be grateful to those who taught you. Those who came before you, these sturdy sons and loyal daughters: hold their memory dear. Their battle is fought, their race is won. THINK. Now, it is you. Praise this mutilated world. Tend this derelict garden. Collapse into now.

And then, the next reel begins...