This Must Be the Place I Don't Believe in Ghosts, but If I Were a Ghost, I
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“Take me to the magic of the moment on a glory night.” ~Scorpions (“Winds of Change”) “…And noble Odysseus wakened and sat up and began pondering in his heart and his spirit.” ~The Odyssey (Book VI, Lattimore) This Must Be The Place I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I were a ghost, I would be found haunting my childhood bedroom in Dayton, Minnesota. I’d be found in the walls, specifically. This spookiness is all hypothetical, of course, but if one wanted to find my incorporeal specter, one ought to look, even more specifically, in the space between the wall and the wallpaper. In 1991, when I was ten and beginning 5th grade, our family moved 20 miles down the road to “the country,” from a house overlooking a golf course in the densely-populated suburb of Brooklyn Park to a 10-acre private park outside the mostly-rural town of Dayton. Six of our ten acres were a cornfield beside the Crow River, while the rest was a wooded lawn surrounding a hidden house encircled by gardens, a dense forest of jack pines and an apple orchard beside a large pond populated with ducks and cattails. Although almost everything about the two houses was different, the one bit of continuity between the two was the wallpaper in my bedroom which I’d deliberately chosen to have applied in our new house. We made this move for no reason, except that my sisters and I had persuaded our parents by collaborating on a pastoral crayon drawing featuring a red barn, some horses, a dog and a split-log fence. This drawing also featured one more element which was probably its highest selling-point: a smiling family. Although the transition was stressful, especially starting at our new school while still living at the old house (since we moved a few weeks into the school year), it was a welcome stress since everything about living in Brooklyn Park was bad for me. For instance, two immediate changes brought by my new school in Rogers came with two tests with opposite results. The first was on my academic ability, which found me in the top groups for math and reading (I was in the bottom groups for math and reading in Brooklyn Park). The second was on my vision, where I was found to be damn-near blind (I’d avoided getting glasses by cheating on the yearly school vision test…To this day, I don’t understand how a kid who memorizes the letter chart and simply recites the blurry letters can trick all of the adults in his life that he doesn’t need glasses). Those two problems were correlated, obviously, and it didn’t help that I was literally bullied by my 4th grade teacher. So, needless to say, everything about our new home in Dayton was a vast improvement for me. Except for my bedroom, because even though I’d laid it out to look exactly the same as my previous room, including the identical wallpaper, it still didn’t feel like home. There were two basic reasons for this. The first was the view out of the window. Instead of it being a northward view of my old neighborhood, the view in Dayton was nothing but a solid row of giant jack pines, filled in by another few rows behind it. The second was the carpeting. Not just the type or the color of the carpet, but the smell of it. To put it simply, it smelled like the person who’d lived in the room before me—a teenager named “Chad.” And when I say it “smelled like Chad” in this ambiguous way, I am indeed leaving you to your imagination, just as I was left to mine. As these two differences were the only things I couldn’t control and replicate from the old house, they combined to create and reinforce this simple fact: I was no longer living at home. Perhaps this story seems a bit overwrought or a little obvious, but I promise I am going somewhere with this. There is a term for this sort of phenomenon, when something is so familiar—yet not—that it becomes off-putting and creepy. The word is unheimlich, and the concept was carefully defined and expounded upon by Sigmund Freud. This unheimlich feeling is a deeply-ingrained, subconscious defense mechanism which causes a person to have a heightened awareness of subtle details and discrepancies that might make a critical difference for them in their daily life-and-death survival. Daily life for humans used to involve life-and-death: remember that. Without this neurosis, one might fall into the sort of indifference that would lead one to take a similar-yet-incorrect path home, for instance. And in my situation, with my nearly- identical bedroom 20 miles down the road, with my view of trees instead of houses and with “Chad” rising from the floorboards, my subconscious wanted my conscious mind to know I’d taken a similar path to somewhere else. Unheimlich is not necessarily a bad thing: in fact, we have a tendency to try to seek it out when we are in the mood for a thrill or excitement. The unheimlich moment is great for generating new memories, as it tends to heighten our awareness to anything new or unexpected that is present or that is happening. This seems reasonable since the “something new” object or event and the “there’s something slightly off” feeling are most-likely correlated. See: the mind is clever this way. So for me, in that moment while adjusting to my new living environment, missing the past and eager for the future, staring at my familiar wallpaper and at an endless view of jack pines, surrounded by freedom and troubled by the eau-du-Chad representing my anxiety for my lost past, my memory has created an instant portal back to all of it through all the music which was brand new to me at the time. Cooleyhighharmony, from start to finish, is the album which takes me back the strongest. What is Cooleyhighharmony, you ask? It was the first major album released by the Philadelphia- native a cappella group Boyz II Men. I consider it to be the first CD I ever owned. To be utterly autobiographical, my actual, actual first CD was by Arrested Development. It wasn’t the full album, though, just the single for “Tennessee” which came with three songs on it. In fact, all three tracks might have been different versions of “Tennessee.” It was sort of disappointing and embarrassing, I recall, because when I bought it, I thought I was getting the full album and a good deal. But at least I learned a lesson: If something costs only $4.99, it probably isn’t worth five bucks. But Cooleyhighharmony is pure pop perfection. From the first notes, and from the first few rumbles of Mike McCary’s deep voice, you’ll be certain you’ve put yourself on the right track. This is the album with Boyz II Men’s first big hits, such as “Motownphilly” and “Please Don’t Go.” It isn’t wall-to-wall (I can’t vouch for “Sympin”), but it’s full of the spirit of the album, which is the excitement of these four young men who are eager for a bright future. “Let me show you now the way it would be if you were with me.” “Lonely Heart” (Track 2) Yes! Bring me back! Hearing this makes me believe dinner is in the oven downstairs. My strongest memories aren’t necessarily about the moments I cherish, like this one, or of events I remember with the greatest detail. Instead they are a stray and random collection of moments which have somehow weft their way into the fabric of my sense of self, the strongest ones are recollections of what happened, but also how it felt to be within that particular moment. These come back to me in all their complexity, but they work best when I’m properly broadsided and have gone awhile since the last time I remembered it. This is like smelling a scented candle – somehow you lose track of the smell if you go on smelling it for too long (signal fatigue, they call it). But there is something inspiring and invigorating about recollecting a time when you felt inspired or invigorated. This feeling translates to the present in a special, reaffirming way. “And the world I would not take for exchange for this feeling I have in my heart.” “This Is My Heart” (Track 3) So good…And the music is of a sort that I don’t normally listen to, so it has kept itself sequestered in its own room in my memory. A room that smells like someone else’s socks. Then there is Joshua Tree by U2. This is a CD I would play on the stereo in the family room downstairs when I had a chance to play some PC games and no one else was trying to watch the TV. This album has a deeper connection for me since it was something which helped ease me off of my rampant anxiety at that age. After hitting “play,” there are a few seconds of silence which will make you think you’d forgotten to press “play.” But as it slowly raises from silence to fill the room, the rich and refined music of the album come to wash over you and make you feel like you’re in the right place.