Memories

 

FOR those of us who are of a certain age, not that I want to tell you how to handle your life and family, but maybe you should consider taking the chance of imparting some of your experiences on the youngsters.

I had a weird day, and decided to have a couple of drinks and put on my MOST AWESOME DISCO PLAYLIST EVER to unwind while I made dinner, ahead of my 20-year-old daughter/roommate returning from classes.

(by the way, if anyone is interested, the playlist can be found at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aR4jfU4krN2P4FYeXLl9M?si=-w9BMie3SrWJmuHRf8TXUQ&pi=2Z8i7fwxSaK8e) 

Ilona had an unusual and to be honest, rather ego-salving story to relate. She has a biochemistry professor, a soft-spoken, Bob Ross kind of guy, but one who occasionally drops a tidbit of personal history that indicates that this guy has seen some shit. He was an army nurse “in the war.” What army, and what war, no one knows. Today, he casually related to his class how one deals with radiation victims, without providing further context, other than saying it in such a way, according to my daughter, that made it clear he was speaking from first-hand experience.

What?! I have to meet this guy.

Anyway, the part of her report from today’s biochem class session that caught my attention was her interaction with this teacher when she handed in her quiz for the day (20 minutes ahead of all her classmates, because she’s really good at this). She said he gave her a curious look and then asked her, “are you Hungarian, or maybe Romanian?”

We are, in fact, of mostly Hungarian descent. Well, I am; she is half that and half Moro Filipino, but it’s my genes that won, and she could – as I have – land in Budapest and be assumed to be a native. She looks like my sister, actually. It is highly unusual for someone to guess our ethnicity, in any part of the world (outside Eastern Europe), and especially here in Asia. It’s only happened to me twice; once when I first met a Romanian expat of Hungarian extraction (he’s a good guy, I should look him up, come to think of it), and once when I met a Hungarian nun at a festival put on by the EU Mission and addressed her as nővér.

That started a conversation about heritage and family history, which segued into the always fascinating topic of “Dad When He Was Young and not Decrepit.” I caught her grooving along to the disco music, which was not a normal reaction, as she usually rolls her eyes so hard you can hear them and puts on her headphones when she walks in on my filling the house with my music, as young people should.

So, I committed the ordinarily unforgivable sin and asked her, “Do you like this music?”

She stopped and gave me a thoughtful look, “It’s not my speed, I gotta be honest. But...it makes me feel connected, somehow. I’m thinking about my professor today, and I feel like maybe...I don’t know what you call it, but maybe there’s a thread of history I’m connected to – our culture, and especially you. You listen to different music, usually, but you act different when you’re playing this disco stuff. Why?”

I grew up, came of age so to speak, across the latter half of the 70s and the first half of the 80s, and while my own musical tastes morphed from disco to new wave to punk across those years, it was the disco that imprinted on me. Not just the music, but the entire vibe of the world at that time. If there was one moment in history that I would say made me what I am now more than any other, I would say the summer of 1978 – the Summer of Sam. And god bless Spike Lee, I will always be a fan, because he nailed that shit.

For all its flaws and awfulness, the world when we were young still had some promise. I’m not sure it does anymore. So talk to your kids. Tell them how it was, and how you felt. What it was like to take five hits of mescaline and see lizards coming out of the walls. Or playing “midnight drive” with Brother Tom on the front lawn of the frat house in the dead of night, and counting the seconds until the golf ball  launched into the dark made the sound of hitting something a few blocks away, and trying to guess what that was. Or living under the perceived constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Or the AIDS epidemic. Or acid rain. Or making friends with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee kids who suddenly appeared in school. For as scary as the world could be, there was always a sense that we were tougher and smarter than whatever it could throw at us, and that if we kept our hearts in the right place and did our best, we would eventually come out okay.

I don’t know if the world is like that anymore, and it saddens me more than I can describe. But the way of the world is up to us, so maybe if those of us whose better days are far behind share how we got to our ripe old age but still full of piss and vinegar, maybe the generations whose turn it is to run the world will find it in themselves to actually do it.