Langley is a small jewel of a town by the sea where I happen to be born. As the story goes, while my Mom was in labor my family was watching “The Bad News Bears.” When the movie was over, she only made it to the doctor’s office in Langley before I was born, not to the hospital further up the island as planned. The way the family tells it, the doctor said, “Wait until I get my gloves on!” As I rushed into the world at the near perfect hour of 10:30pm on a Friday night. I love knowing the little details, the movie my older siblings, 10, 12, and 14 were watching at the time, the living room where they sat in the house my Dad built, the big old television with wooden legs that stuck around until the mid 80s, the story is a mix of my own memories and how it was remembered by my family and they have become intertwined.
When I drive down the hill into Langley on a sunny day where the water glistens and the mountains along the horizon pop against the deep blue sky, the stories of the place race through my mind. The church on the right where I can picture my Grandma and Grandpa on folding chairs in front of the buffet table at a celebration for their 50th wedding anniversary, the bus stop where I smoked cigarettes with my friends as a delinquent teenager, the parsonage past the church where my Dad climbed out his window and down a tree to meet up with my Mom as high school sweethearts back in the 60s. The images that trail by are my memories, my family’s memories, stories I’ve heard about the town, sometimes even dreams or things I have imagined.
I know this place deeply and it speaks a different language to me than new places do, and I don’t mean the spoken language of the people passing by. I arrived back here after traveling around the world on the most intense journey of my life, a trip to 20 countries in 9 months. The life I had left behind was in the city of Seattle, but when my husband and I came back to the U.S., the plan was to return to Whidbey Island, a place I hadn’t lived in 20 years. Nomad life had been a bracing abundance of scenes and smells and surprises, histories, flavors and sacred moments to file away in my mind. I had grown accustomed to everything new all the time, the languages of people passing by were music rather than words, and I encountered very few people I knew during that time. I became comfortable in the onslaught of the unknown and the way it keeps your attention focused in the moment, navigating with all of your senses to meet your basic daily needs, to way find step by step, and to move through the internal emotions and reactions to it all.
The contrast between these experiences of place makes me think how moving through different places flows differently through the mind. Imagine a map of memories. This corner of Langley before I turn left into town and then right onto 1st or 2nd street, has memories by the square yard, layers and layers of snapshots, rippling with emotion and meaning ranging from birth to funeral processions, holding hands in the movie theater, loved ones at many ages, and lost ones that remain one age for all time.
If I picture my memories of Bangkok, where I spent 3 weeks and brought in the 2019 new year, there is a wealth of experiential memory, the snapshots are poignant but spread out across the city. The moment of reaching the foot of the 150’ long golden Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho Temple and seeing the Buddha’s journey carved in scenes of mother of pearl on his towering feet. Sipping a perfect vesper martini looking out over the Chau Phraya at night from the blue lit rooftop bar. Jumping onto the river ferry under the glare of the ancient old woman standing next to the captain, unable to find the right coin to pay her, when a smiling local man hands her the coin and waves kindly to us silly foreigners.
The island map in my mind is layered with experiences defined by many stories and relationships is also layered with folds of time. In new places, new experiences are rich and full, completely captivating all my senses and my being, and occur primarily in the present. My mind of course wanders and brings in elements at random as I walk the sidewalk noting that the flow of motorbikes on the street in Ho Chi Minh is like a river compared to the storm cloud formation and energy of tuktuk and car traffic on the thoroughfare of Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bengaluru. The mind has a tendency to wander across time no matter whether the experience or place is new or known. But the density of time folded over and over in the old place, is the element that contrasts most with the experience of traveling life.
When a place triggers attention to go back in time, it’s as if the memory lives in the place and not in the mind. But then walking across the short grass on a small Thai island and striking first one foot into the sand and then the other, the gritty tickle between my toes carries me across the world and time to the first warm gray sand of summer on my Pacific Northwest island as a small girl racing breathlessly onto the beach. Memory and time travel also live in sensations of the body.
Is attention the driver across memory and time?
Attention moves like a flock of birds making their chaotic dance across the sky. The flock of birds dart near the church and parsonage, the nearby bus stop, then somehow flit along the remembered skyline in Bangkok or to pale sand extending into clear water, deepening to the turquoise of the Andaman Sea.
The birds of attention can fly between place and across time with the bat of a wing.
Somehow before I reach the parking lot in Langley at the Star Store grocery where my Grandma once worked her first job in the 1930s, I have traveled the world.
During my time on the road and over the last couple of years I wrote a memoir. As I wrote, I spent time thinking about the relationships between memory, place, and time and how these aspects of reality exist and occur in the mind. In my approach to memoir writing I had a separate document like a table of contents where I worked on structure and strategy to organize the non-liner chapters of my book weaving scenes from my travels with chronological memories selected from the rest of my life. I spent hours thinking about the structure document, but I also allowed the birds of attention to fly their natural pattern across time and place, across the sensations of the body, and watched for their clues on what was important to include.
Not all memories are fond and beautiful. I started with writing the memories that I knew were part of my idea of myself and my strategies for survival. Slowly I realized that to tell my story I would also have to spend time with memories that are infused with humiliation, the confirmation of irrational fears, the memories that circled like a poison generating negative thoughts over the years. One chapter I wrote in Tirana, Albania took so much energy to embody that I cried after, but then stepped out into the sunshine and walked down the road surrounded by the lilt of the Albanian language in a culture that seems to consider smoking and conversation to be national pastimes and I kept my attention on the moment and I felt free.
The way we humans move through life between sensation, time, place, and memory is an incredible and fascinating gift. The birds of attention guide us through our travels of place and time in all of our moments. Writing a memoir is like one bird of the flock of my mind making a visible flight pattern across the sky for others to observe and consider. My attempt to bring the layered texture of memory from places I know well and places I met just briefly and share the ways I stumbled through my life the best I could. It might seem like a simple thing to drive through the woods to the quietest of towns that shimmer by the sea, past a small church to reach the grocery store, but depending on the wind and the whims of attention a whole world of life can happen in just those few minutes.
