Column #1
“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” -Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby I’ve never been a baseball fan, but as a kid, I cheered for any team named “Cardinals.” Consequently, when I was seven years old and my family took a trip to St. Louis, we went to a Cardinals baseball game.
Only, we didn’t stay for the entire game. My younger sister had ear issues at the time, and the noise of the stadium bothered her. We left once she reached her loudness threshold during the seventh inning. I was disappointed to miss the end of the game, but I didn’t dwell on the subject for more than a day.
After forgetting about that game for more than a decade, I was reminded of it when, on the way to the Hagan scholarship conference in July, I again was in St. Louis. The Cardinals had a game scheduled for 1:15 p.m., which fit in my itinerary. I had an opportunity to “right” a “wrong” from the past and attend a full game. I adopted the mindset expressed in the quote above, with the goal of repeating a wholly insignificant part of my past (the day leading up to the game was memorable, but the game itself was not).
The Cardinals won 11-3 after scoring nine runs in the first inning. I stayed until the last out and completed my mission. I thought it was funny to “repeat” the past, especially when the repetition corrected a moment of no particular gravity.
After consideration, I think the unimportance of the game from over a decade ago is the reason why I counted my repetition of the past as a success. I didn’t dwell on the many differences between the day in June 2012 and the one in July 2024 that nullified my “repeat the past” motif because I was achieving a goal statement- I will go to a Cardinals game and stay for the entire game because I was sort of disappointed when I didn’t last timeinstead of actually repeating the past.
However, I equated this goal statement with the past because my memory lacked substance, and I’d forgotten anything unique to the game from 2012. What I recall is going to a Cardinals game 12 years ago and failing to stay for all nine innings. To repeat my memory of Cardinals game, all I had to do was return to a Cardinals game. It wasn’t as if I actually repeated the past and the blend of thoughts, feelings, and actions exclusive to a single moment. That can not be repeated.
Although unrepeatable, the past is not separated from people by an impassable barrier; it can be remembered.
More powerful yet, people can collectively remember. I witnessed this when I recently wrote about the Hillside first-grade reunion. Almost 70 years later, they reminisced together, reconnecting with a time gone by.
Like publishing the Hillside story, part of a local newspaper’s role is to document the collective memory of its community, to gather the stories that, when fitted together, resemble the community. Many of these stories aren’t flashy. On the surface, they appear unremarkable, but they are what make up life in the community. These “regular” memories and the true character of the time they represent will be forgotten without efforts to remember and record them.
In a small part of compiling pieces of the community’s history, I am working on an article series about people who have walked around Medford for years and what they remember from that time. If you are willing to share a walking story, contact the Star News.
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Saskatoon Damm
