The History (Bringing it Back)
Do you remember the good old days? Most of us have our own feel good memories to fall back on when things aren’t quite going our way. A comforting space where our own version of the story is told with a sense of pride and confidence. It’s a phenomenon that seems to help us deal with the bullshit we encounter on a daily basis today. My parents have their version. So do senior salespeople who remember walking into their offices 15 minutes late without having a computer scan their IDs and automatically dock them. I too, of course, own a version of this nostalgic phenomenon. At least one. And like most others, my versions were told sans evidence, or any logical reasoning for that matter. My early years were very important in defining myself today. How I remembered those early years played a critical role in the process. Those were what I called, the good old days. And oh, how I wish I was back there, starting anew, with a fresh set of goals, a more mature perspective, and endless possibilities. Most of my pre – high school years were spent in Miami Beach. If you’d asked me five years ago to describe my early, Miami Beach life, the story would have gone something like this… I lived in a glorious neighborhood; a mixture of upper middle class families, lower middle class families, and everything in-between. I was surrounded by friends, and family, and all the good times a child could ask for, which made the one and a half to two mile walk to and from school each and every weekday, an exhilarating adventure. I had a view of the waterway from my second floor apartment window, and a long list of weekend activities to choose from. Everything was designed, at least as I remembered it, to stimulate and inspire the most ambitious of 10 year old minds. This may not have been paradise, but it was close.
This was the early 80s, an era that left quite an impression on me. One that would last, well, I suppose I could say a lifetime. Every story about my childhood included my core interests; my bicycle, my Colecovision gaming system with the oh-so-incredible Super Action Controller, the Miami Dolphins, and my favorite interest of them all, music. Michael Jackson was making moves, along with Blondie, Hall & Oates, Toto, Men At Work, Journey and a host of other popular artists. But I was more interested in Electric Funk, the birth of Hip Hop, and breakdancing. As I traveled back in time to tell my version of the story, Afrika Bambaataa, The Soul Sonic Force, Man Parrish, Twilight 22, The Egyptian Lover, Newcleus, Planet Patrol and many more of these music pioneers were, as the great Willie Nelson once sang, always on my mind. There’s a lot to say about the music I fell in love with, but we’ll tackle that in a later post. As for the memory of my childhood, without fail, I’d describe it as a utopia of a world from which I derived my current drive, character, likes and dislikes. In early 2020, I decided to write a book about my life. This tiny island called Biscayne Point, one of three islands west of the city’s mainland, would become the backdrop for a story I was hoping would create, and accurately illustrate the razor sharp contrasts between those good old days, and modern day struggles.
My 2020 backdrop was Downtown Miami. Construction on the Brightline train station had recently been completed, so during my lunch break, it became one of my favorite places to sit, think, research and write. Whole Foods, Bayfront Park, Bayside, Government Center, Perez Art Museum, Museum Park, and any number of Metro Mover Stations also became writing, thinking and creative spaces for what I expected to be one heck of a story. I’d also walk quite a bit during lunch breaks. Not only is walking great exercise, but I felt it exposed my mind to possibilities otherwise unnoticed. If you saw a man dressed in business attire, with a Canon camera strapped around his body, walking Downtown Miami during lunchtime between 2015 and 2022, you saw me.
During this time I thought I’d come up with a reliable formula for cultivating powerful and accurate memories. Accuracy was important to me. The last thing I wanted to encounter was evidence that I had been falsifying information. Or even that I was slightly wrong in the way that I described my early life, although my guess is there are a lot worse transgressions than getting a 40 year old detail or two wrong. I can deal with an odd look and challenging question if I know the mistake was not intentional. Besides, I was no stranger to odd looks and occasional questions from people wondering what I was doing dressed the way I was, carrying a camera and taking photos of just about everything I could. I was also no stranger to being kicked out of malls, banks, churches, and construction areas. But I was undeterred. I was excited to bring the world the story they’d been waiting for. Or so I thought. And photography seemed to further open my eyes to subjects I probably would have ignored had I not been taking photos. I was a couple years away from retirement when I’d amassed memories, photos, notes, ideas, lists and bullet points to the degree I felt sufficient to begin writing my book. The first chapter was to be titled, The Good Old Days.
Those Good Old Days
The Good Old Days is defined on Merriam – Webster’s Online Dictionary as, “a period of time in the past that a person thinks were [Sic] pleasant and better than the present time.” We all have experienced this in one form or another. If you’ve never gone back in time to envision a world better than today, then perhaps you know a person or two, or three, or more, who do this on a regular basis. Not only have I taken part in someone else’s nostalgic conversations, but I’d soon fall victim to this phenomenon in a very personal way. A twist I hadn’t anticipated. A stumbling block right out of the book writing gates. This may come as a surprise to some, but in almost every case, our memories are wrong in regard to describing those Good Old Days. At least to the degree that we feel life was actually “better” than it is today. Which brings me back to my book.
To start, I needed street names, apartment numbers, logistical information and so on. I hadn’t remembered the name of the streets I walked, or the exact apartment block I lived in, but today’s technology cleared everything up for me. Technology, by the way, that didn’t exist in 1980. Which would have made my research so much more difficult for the 1980 version of me. At any rate, I started by finding my Elementary School, and tracking my steps home through neighborhood streets – Google Maps is an invaluable service in such cases. And a great tool for fact checking the accuracy of memories that felt rock solid and legitimate moments earlier.
I am often described by friends and family as having an elephant’s brain. I think I remember more than most because of my daily journaling habit, not because I have some special, innate advantage over others when recalling details. It was during this part of the research that I began to notice flaws in my recollection of the facts. Distance estimates were the first and most obvious errors. I mapped routes to my home street through Hawthorne Avenue, Crespi Boulevard, Tatum Waterway Drive to the pedestrian walkway on 80th Street to Crespi, and all of them returned a distance of 7 tenths of a mile. For years, my version of the story doubled, or even tripled the actual distance walked. It’s difficult to express how hard that was to believe. Planet Earth has changed quite a bit since the 1980s, but not enough to jusitfy the difference in distance. Which begs the question of why I created those distances in the first place, and where the specific numbers originated? We’ll look at that in a bit.
As my research progressed, I began to notice a pattern. A pattern of wholesale mistakes not only with facts, but with emotional connections as well. I noticed that in the good old days, I built a positive emotional connection to things that didn’t exist. At least not in the way I would feel comfortable describing to anyone today. Remember the contrast I was hoping to create with my book, well, I found it. Only it wasn’t the contrast I expected to present to the world. There was contrast alright, but it wasn’t the difference between today’s miserable circumstances and history’s glory days. The clouds didn’t clear to reveal Gods atop Mount Olympus. Instead it poured as I began to see the difference between what I thought was a beautiful world and what I was seeing on my computer screen. Contrast between nostalgic memories, and what really existed. I was, and still am, open to challenging my beliefs. I understood the inaccuracies of memory, and the creative ways in which we fill in blank spaces. But for some reason, this caught me totally off-guard.
The Problem With Nostalgia
One early morning, as I rolled through the virtual streets of Biscayne Point, a flood of memories began to appear. As if they’d been hidden or locked away. I’d discovered a key that opened a memory vault locked nearly 40 years, spilling the contents onto the floor at my feet. Interestingly, nearly all of those memories, if not all, were negative in nature. Suddenly, 1980 Crespi Park couldn’t compare to what I was seeing on the screen. And the oh-so-impressive Stillwater Park, where I learned to play soccer, baseball and football, and where I spent my summers, was not quite as spectacular in comparison to today’s parks. Shiny fences and immaculate walls rusted and crumbled away as I thought more about the lie I’d constructed for myself. In a matter of minutes I began to remember what my childhood world was really like. Memories once hidden away, perhaps intended to stay hidden, were now exposed and raw, like an open wound.
Before long, it occurred to me that my memories mixed and matched content to serve a purpose. A purpose so well hidden, I may never have noticed it had I not decided to delve deep into my past. I made the streets and structures in the area appear more pleasing and a touch higher in class and sophistication, while at the same time neglecting to account for Biscayne Point’s fair share of wealthy citizens. What I essentially created was a world slightly more pleasant than it was in reality, while leaving out the fact that the people two blocks away were in a class multiple levels above ours (financially). In addition, the walks to and from school were made to be longer and a bit more grueling, adding some innocent grit to the child I needed people to see. And the overall experience was made to feel happy and devoid of any semblance of suffering. I’d taken bits and pieces of my 40 year journey, sprinkled in some magical goodness, and conveniently deleted the negative. In his book How We Learn, Benedict Arnold explains research on memory…
“The brain does not store facts, ideas and experiences like a computer does. It embeds them in a network of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time. And that just retrieved memory does not overwrite the previous one but intertwines and overlaps with it. Nothing is completely lost, but the memory Trace is altered, and for good. As scientists put it, using our memories changes our memories.”
This explains the wildly inaccurate walking distances to and from school. The ones I seemingly fabricated out of thin air. Today’s version of me spends several days a week walking the Everglades and other natural areas in and around South Florida. My typical walking distance is between 5 and 7 miles, depending on the weather and the location. Because I am intimately aware of what it feels like to walk 1, 2, 3, 4 or more miles with a backpack on at different times of the day, I imagined what would feel appropriately challenging for my childhood self, and assigned that distance to him. I essentially created a false narrative around how far my school day walk was. The scary thing is I didn’t even realize what was happening until I did some proper research that proved my memory, and ultimately, my nostalgic stories, were wildly incorrect.
In his book, Build for Tomorrow, Jason Pfeifer mentions a discussion with Alan Levinovitz, an associate professor of religion at James Madison University. Professor Levinovitz describes Nostalgia as being born of great pain. The product of someone coping with change and loss. Which brings me to all the other falsities and omissions I created regarding my life in Biscayne Point. The truth is, my block was not very friendly at all. There were recently emigrated families in the area with children that often took to our streets, challenging the kids I hung out with to fights on a regular basis. At 10 years of age, I witnessed at least one fist fight a week in my splendiferous Biscayne Point neighborhood. Yet, I cannot recall discussing it once over the past 40 years. What of the fights behind the Parkview Point Condominiums after school (Elementary School)? How could I have forgotten those? How about the roof at Stillwater Park’s recreation center, where rich neighborhood kids would hang out to drink and do drugs on the weekends? I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to anyone… ever. How about Crespi Park, where Kevin, a 19 year old friend of one of the park’s summer camp counselors, would regularly hang out during lunch to tell stories of his weekend adventures. He knocked a dude out in a club the night before, and last week he nearly shot a man who cut him off on the way home from work. That wasn’t just talk either. One afternoon he happened to see the guy who cut him off, riding his bike around the park; what luck. He waited for him behind a tree on the corner of Hawthorne and 79th. And when the time was just right he launched an assault that left the man bloodied and dazed. If I remember this correctly today, and that’s a big if, all of the observers, including me, simply went back to business as usual; lunch, ping pong, checkers, and so on. I’ve never spoken to anyone about Kevin, or his antics because I’d completely forgotten about him. This is an excellent example of the Fading Affect Bias, whereby memories associated with negative emotions are more easily forgotten.
A Final Thought
As I began writing my book, and discovering the discrepancies between what I remembered and what really was, I realized I’d have to come to grips with the fact that I was mistaken. There is no need to soften that sentiment in any way. No need to qualify it or create excuses for why that may have been. I’d either have to settle for writing fiction, or change most of what I’d been describing to the world (my tiny part of the world) for many years. There are those who argue passionately against me. What’s the matter with telling the story the way I remember it? Who is going to tell me more about my experience than me? Why should I have to change my story? Who cares if I made the miserable view from my second floor apartment window seem unbelievably beautiful and inspiring? I’m writing this book, telling this story, sharing this experience… on and on and on. Okay, I get it. Here’s what I would say to those who simply want to remember what they remember. If you can live with knowing that your memory is not as accurate as you think it is, and that if someone really looked into the stories you told (particularly as it relates to the “Good Old Days”), they’d find a number of false claims and inaccuracies, then go for it. I suppose there’s no harm in remembering life in ways that support your happiness. Perhaps you’d argue that I’m remembering a false narrative that supports my sadness? That’s fair. But in this instance, what I sought was a story as close to the truth as I could get. Understanding of course that “truth” itself, in most cases, is subjective. Obviously I failed in delivering such a product, but I learned a valuable lesson. If you are, in any way, trying to describe the most truthful story you can about a distant memory, it is best to reconsider your journey back to the “Good Old Days.” At the very least, look for evidence-based information to prove that something was as “good” as you claim it was; news stories, books, pictures, and so on. Because in almost every case of nostalgia, your memory fails you. Oh how I long for those Good Ol’ Days. Let me know about your nostalgic experiences below.
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