Scarsdale, New York
I can think of no better place than my old room in my parents’ house
in Scarsdale to reminisce over a theme that has been with me all weekend:
memories. This room is my fortress of
solitude. For eight years, it was the
one place that was mine, the one place where no one could enter without my
permission. Even if we were fighting,
all I had to do was barricade the door to keep out my parents. If the fighting was bad, or they insisted on
continuing to nag me through the door, all I had to do was blare Avril Lavigne
or the TV to drown out the noise. Why my
father thought that by yelling at me to do my homework, which would in turn cause
me to create noise to drown him out would possibly cause me to be able to focus
on my homework is beyond me, but is just one of the many memories I have of the
past fifteen years from this room, from this house, from this town.
There are good memories and bad memories,
just as there is good and bad in my life right now. The good is mostly the people in my life,
whether it is a best friend who reentered my life in 2011, a girl who changed
my life in 2012 in a way that she has no idea and may never know and has been
the predominant “force for good” in my life since I met her, a new best friend
that developed spontaneously in the fall of 2014, or another girl who became like
a sister to me at the end of the year.
These four people, my four best friends, are the good in my life.
There is plenty of bad, too, but this entry
is not about the present, it’s about the past, it’s about memories. I am currently smoking my 2006 Christmas
Pipe, over eight years old, and my world has gone to hell and back in that
time, but I don’t even want to talk about the memories of that time, I want to
go back further, to talk about the memories of while I was living in this
house, while this room was my only sanctuary.
I mentioned the good and the bad, and there is always good and bad. I can never be purely happy for more than
like an hour. Invariably some negative
thought or event creeps in. I’m
stressing over a relationship, a trip I’m planning is falling apart, someone
isn’t responding to my texts, a friend is bailing on our plans, whatever it is,
there is always some bad that creeps in and sours the good. It could be 90% good, but the 10% bad is the
thought that permeates.
However, that’s
okay because, with memories, you can segregate the good from the bad. The bad works itself out, and you forget why
you were ever stressing about the bad, and you only remember the good. If you do remember the bad, you can remember
it as distinct from the good, not as permeating the good. You remember the night when you stayed all
night preparing for a math competition that you were determined to take no
matter what, when you took it with almost no sleep because this was the only
chance you had to prepare yourself for it.
You don’t remember what stressors were preventing you from preparing
earlier. You just remember that you
determined to do it, and you did it.
You
remember all of your crushes. You
remember how happy you were every time your crush sat down next to you in
class, how you could barely focus, how you were almost afraid to speak in class
that day because you were going to blurt out her name. You remember how cute your 9th
Grade Crush was, how you were convinced that you were in love with her. Even if you didn’t know what love was then
(or even if you still don’t know what it is), you know that what you felt when
she sat down next to you, when she did her little happy dance, when she smiled
at you, when she said your name, you knew that you had never felt anything like
that before. You remember when you cried
when you found out that she had a boyfriend, not because it meant you didn’t
have a chance, but because you were an idiot, because you thought you were in
love with her when you really didn’t know anything about her. You have good memories about her and bad
memories, but you can remember those memories independently. You can hold onto the good while you also
remember the bad.
You remember your 8th
Grade Crush and the trick that she played on you, the cruelest trick anyone had
ever played on you. No, you don’t
remember the good about her. She was a
blithering idiot, a tall blonde (which may explain why you are now attracted to
smart, short, brunettes), and you remember exactly why you liked her. You even remember staring at her in Spanish
class or when she got a 55 on an exam, an exam that you aced. However, you don’t have the good memories of
her. You have bad memories of the trick
that she played on you, but you also have good memories of how you didn’t let
it get to you, how the next year you listened to Sk8er Boi so many times until
you knew that you would never again let any girl bring you down and instead
lift yourself up so that one day someone would say to her, “Sorry girl, but you
missed out, that boy’s mine now.”
These
are the memories you have. I could keep
going. You remember your 7th
Grade Crush, how you almost invited her to your Bar Mitzvah, in spite of the
fact that you had a girlfriend at the time.
You remember your girlfriend, how the relationship ended when you told
her that she’d have to call you back after the Bob Costas introduction during
the Sydney Olympics. You remember
sitting on the couch with her, you remember sitting on the couch with your
laptop pretending to listen to her on the phone, you remember telling her that
you loved her even though you didn’t, something you swore you’d never do
again. You remember your 6th
Grade Crush, you remember leaving a Valentine’s Day card in her locker,
something you’re sure that she has long forgotten. You don’t really have any good memories about
her, either. Actually, you don’t have
any good memories about any of your Middle School Crushes.
Middle School was a hard time for you. You didn’t have any real friends, the one
person you did hang out with regularly, the only person you could have called a
friend was really just your rival. You
were the two smartest kids in the school.
You would bus over to the High School to take advanced level math
courses, and you were both top of the class.
You were on that bus when you heard that a plane had crashed into the
World Trade Center. You remember getting
off the bus and asking him, “What did the crazy Palestinians do this time?” You remember donating your birthday money two
days later to the cause. You remember
going to a box store to buy gloves for the construction workers. You remember how you knew the world would
never be the same again. You remember
your Y2K celebration and the Official new millennium celebration, both of them with
him, one at his house, one at your house maybe?
These are good memories. You also
remember the day where he say casually said, “I’m not his friend.”
You remember when you swore off friendship
when you decided that you didn’t need any friend other than yourself. That was before you spent 3 weeks in Alaska
with your best friend from elementary school, before you texted back and forth
50 times in one day with the prettiest girl in the world about a stupid blue
and black dress, before you went down to DC with another friend just for the
heck of it, before you realized what it meant to love someone like a sister and
to be genuinely sad that she was upset and happy when she’s happy. Those are your four friends, and you have
memories of times when you had zero friends, when you didn’t want any friends.
How did your spend your time then? Well, you have very happy memories of that
time. You remember Super Mario 64, the
greatest video game of all time. You
remember how you couldn’t wait to get home so that you could play it for an
hour before you had to start your homework.
You can still see the console from your bed. You remember the scary levels that you wouldn’t
play if you were alone in the house or if it was after dark. You remember Quarterback Club and Ken Griffey
Baseball. Those are all good
memories. You remember Neopets. You remember how there were RPGs you loved so
much, how on Friday nights you were allowed to stay up as late as you wanted to
play them, your mom allowing that you would be able to fix your sleep schedule
by Monday. That’s a great memory. You even considering doing it again, finding
out what new RPGs have come out over the past decade, and wonder if any of them
could be as good as the ones you knew and love.
You could even replay your old favorites, but you don’t have time for
that now in your busy life.
You remember
the rough times that started in 10th Grade. You remember having to stay up late finishing
assignments because you lost your ability to focus, not being able to sleep
even when you could focus, your life slowly turning to hell. You have repressed as many memories as you
can from 11th and 12th Grades, the ones that are too
painful to recall even a decade later.
Those were bad memories. You think
how, if you could have one wish, you’d be able to relive your life from 10th
Grade with the knowledge and experience you know have, how, if you could do
that, you might have pure happiness right now.
You think of all the little moments over the past decade you would
replay, all the little mistakes you made.
Those are bad memories.
You
remember further back, you remember your 5th Grade Crush, a girl who
is just as adorable now that she’s engaged as she was when you used to leave
Synagogue early together to go to baseball games. You learned that she was actually a friend
before you realized that you were incapable of having a female friend without
developing a crush on her, your two current female friends included. You remember the teacher who changed your
life in 5th Grade just by showing you a little bit of respect and
honesty, more respect and honesty than your parents were showing you at the
time, something for which you will never forgive them, no matter how much they thought
they were protecting you.
You remember
when your brother went off to college, how you would cry every time you went to
the train station with him, how the KFC you would get was small comfort. You remember all the times you went to visit
him in Philadelphia. You have good
memories and bad memories of time you have spent you with your brother over the
fifteen years in this house, often interspersed, but, in retrospect, you can
remember the good and the bad separately.
You remember all the days you would get drunk together when you were in
your teens and he didn’t know how to take his liquor straight so he would have you
drink half of his gin so that he could add the Diet Sprite to the cup. You remember playing Quarterback Club and
Mario Kart together and with his friends.
You remember how he made sure all of his friends, all of his girlfriends
were accepting of you and treated you like a member of the group.
That is why you call the girl he is about to
marry your sister. She’s not “like a
sister.” You consider her your sister,
and you are possibly even closer with her now than you are with him, though the
two girls you think are like a sister to you and the two guys you call “bro,”
your four friends, are closer to you than your brother and sister. You were friendly enough with his friends
that when it came to organize his bachelor party there was no question of you
reaching out directly to his friends.
One of his friend’s sister used to babysit for you. You definitely had a crush on her. You remember the good and the bad, but of
your brother and his friends, you remember almost only the good.
You remember when you moved into this house,
how you cried to leave your old house but also how exciting it was to move into
the new house. It was good and bad and
probably seemed all bad at the time, but you can now separate the good and the
bad and remember the good separately.
You could go back further, but this entry is about the memories you have
from living in this house, and your pipe is finished. You remember the fights, you remember the
disappointments, you remember the bad, but you also remember the good, and that
is what matters most, the happy memories.
It was 8 PM when I started writing this entry, and that was always
shower time. If I could push it back to
8:02 PM, or even 8:10 PM, that was a win, but at 27 years old, I get to decide
when shower time is. I can take my
shower at 9:30 PM, which is when it will be by the time I publish this entry
and get into the shower, or, if I were so inclined, I could take it in the
morning or not at all. I encourage my
readers to think about the good memories of their life and, if they can, try to
remember the times that seemed bleak as they were occurring but are now only
good memories.
Oh, I can’t close yet, the Olympics. You remember each and every Olympics you watched in this house. You remember Sochi 2014, you remember bringing McDonald’s in from the city. You remember waking up in the middle of the night to watch the Cross Country races and the Biathlon with your cigar as you wrote your philosophy paper. You remember the first day when you overslept the first event. You don’t remember much of London 2012 in Scarsdale, though you have plenty of memories from that summer in the city. That was the end of the dark times, that was just after you met the girl who would change your life, the girl who still doesn’t know it (unless she is reading this post). One day you’ll tell her, and she’ll be touched, but not today.
You have almost no memory of Vancouver 2010, since that was during the Dark Times. You remember Beijing 2008, all the times that you raced back and forth into the city, when you put up the aluminum foil on the windows to help keep you on Beijing time, foil that is still there almost seven years later. You remember screaming when Phelps went 8 for 8, when he won a race by a hundredth of second. Your barely remember Turino 2006, since that was during your rough time in 12th Grade.
You remember Athens 2004. That was the best. You remember all the times you raced back and forth to McDonald’s to get your food during lulls in the events. You remember the little cards you made with the winner of each event, before looking up results on the internet was easy. You remember the effort you went through to do your own Decathlon, even the pole vault. You remember Salt Lake City 2002, making your cards all together at the last minute before the ceremonies closed. You remember Sydney 2000 as you mentioned earlier. These were stressful times making the viewing work properly, but you only remember the good, and that is the point of this all.
