Pictures of You

Seems like whenever I go and visit the place I called home for 24 years, some kind of song from my youth gets lodged in my head as a part of the experience. It’s not every time, but happens more often, maybe because now I’ve been in this place I have made into a home 23 years. Something is happening in the balance of my mind about place—calling for music and beauty to fill it in.

When my uncle died suddenly in 2008, the song that wouldn’t leave my ears was Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away.” It made sense to me almost immediately at the time, and stayed with me through the wake and funeral, through the long delayed train ride back to Georgia. Other times I’d link onto a song just to accompany the moments—beach, park, family visits. This year for Christmas it was The Cure’s “Pictures of You,” and like “On the Turning Away,” it made immediate sense to me. It came in strains and solidified itself on the plane back, when one of the in-flight offerings was a 40th anniversary Cure concert in England. What caught me off guard was that the song itself showed me more clearly how I was living inside of a memory and beyond it— how being present can make you completely yourself.

This one is hard to explain, though: what had happened was that an Uncle I had not seen since I was five came with the majority of his family to America to visit with us and see snow and be a part of the life my parents and their siblings had built in a new country. It was the first time they’d all really experienced snow in that way, and the first time I’d met my aunt, who’d married my uncle after I’d gone in 1978. Like so many immigrant gatherings before, though, this was a coming to know and encounter one another, a feast, a kind of saudade come to life. As I looked around the room in between discussions with cousins and my aunt, who I truly enjoyed chatting with in Portuguese, I realized that all of this was sinking into my memory as it happened, in the very moment of its occurrence. I realized that the many years that had passed since my childhood visit to Portugal and the times back and forth between then-home and now-home had formed me, was itself a discernment. I found myself inside the picture I knew I would see someday again and think, oh yes, I remember this well. What a great time we had. What a wonderful encounter between us. I was seeing what Robert Smith near-crooned when he sang “I’ve been living so long with my /pictures of you/That I almost believe that they’re real….”

Maybe some of you have experienced something like this; maybe the holidays bring it out even more. I have been boarding planes for so long I have had so many opportunities to get to this space in time, to see it in my soul. It’s tiring, too—it emotionally wears me even as it builds me. Even so I wish for you this kind of sublime auld lang syne meets saudade meets some other undefinable thing, as the days and weeks pass into this new decade. Peace and All Good.