Author: Elisabeth

Chaperones, memory and imagination

The past is like a chaperone. It travels beside you wherever you go. It might hide from view or stand in the shadows, but it’s always there. And like a chaperone, it keeps an eye on you, whether you want it or not. 

It’s a pity. This metaphor holds patriarchal overtones. Chaperones once accompanied young women in the absence of parents or guardians to keep an eye on them and protect them from their own or anyone else’s mischief. 

The word chaperone speaks of possession and leaves me cold. Still to think about the past in this way, as the person in charge, who’s there to make sure you don’t get up to mischief, seems a reasonable analogy. All for the sake of propriety. 

Chaperones in literature usually take the form of older women, past their prime, who have no interest themselves in getting up to no good and certainly have a vested interest in keeping their young charges pure.

They kept you from that secret night tryst with your forbidden friend, kept you away from anything of which your parents might not approve.

That’s about where the analogy ends. Therapists are not chaperones.

When people front up for therapy they have an opportunity to tell their life story to an interested listener who offers prompts and observations about the way events from your past might coincide with the present. 

When we write our story however and put the details of a life onto the page, there is no therapist other than the one in our minds to guide us along, to help us decide what bears mention and what gets left behind. 

Far more is left behind than enters the space of a memoir, as any one life could fill multiple volumes depending on the approach each writer takes in deciding what bears reflection.

It’s like plucking a rock from the ground, scraping off any surface dirt to reveal what’s hidden beneath. It might turn out to be a diamond, or a sapphire. It might be an opal or a simple lump of quartz. Fool’s gold or simply a splodge of clay. Whatever. In the writer’s hands, the story takes shape. 

And the shape of our past is coloured by the present, by the way we see our experiences today building in the opposite direction. Once we have reached the bedrock, the point of our story, the core of any memory, we begin to dress it with meaning.

We find layers of clothing with which to drape our memory so that it morphs and twists, now this way, from this angle. Now that. The story refuses to stay still. It wants to find new forms of expression. And it wants other eyes to look upon it.

The imagination of the writer kicks in, whether from their child perspective or an adolescent self, right though the various stages of adulthood into old age if the writer is lucky enough. And always the perspective alters. It refuses to sit still, and the writer, if willing and able, might then put on the shoes of another and flick their memory into that other mind, to try it out from their perspective. 

The pin oak in our garden in spring in its first dress for the season

To imagine what this memory looks like from someone other than the central character of what once was the writer’s memoir. This memory also keeps shifting.

Academics undertake reams of research into the nature of memory: how fickle it is, how much it changes shape over time, always with the addition of fresh clues. As through repeatedly examining a photograph. The way we felt when the photograph was taken, if indeed we are present in the photo. Or even if not in the photograph we can begin to imagine ourselves nearby. 

Memory and imagination overlap, close cousins of the mind. They poke and prod one another. Memory pulses with emotions from the past and stirs up hidden aspects of our histories, while imagination busies itself in filling the gaps. And imagination tends to draw on other memories from nearby to add colour to our re-shaping of the past. So that the past is no longer a chaperone. One who constrains us.

The past becomes our servant. One we take hold of. One we examine again and again, if we are fortunate enough to take an interest. And so, memory is ours to accompany as we walk through time with every instant of times past passing into the territory of what once was. The present only a fast-moving speck on the radar of our life and the future stretching ahead of us unknown and seemingly imagined in ever decreasing circles as we age. 

The past gets bigger and bigger with each passing year, and it becomes a heaviness we must carry unless we compartmentalise and divide it up in our experience and no longer give it the power of the chaperone the one who wants to contain and constrain us, but let it run free, in the contained spaces of our imaginations. We will only bring it out if it suits some calling from our need to put it into words, whether written or spoken. When it serves the purpose of adding colour and meaning to our lives. No longer a controlling chaperone but a curious companion. 

A short history of smoking

It’s a long time since I dreamed of smoking cigarettes, the delicious zing down the back of my throat and into my lungs, the exhilaration that comes with each puff. The terrible taste left behind such as you’d need to chew on mint gum or brush your teeth more regularly to freshen your mouth. 

I began to smoke in my early twenties, a late start, when the man I was to marry smoked Galois cigarettes and gave the impression of such comfort in the short colourful sticks of tobacco, the brightly lit end, the ash as it fell, I could not resist. I thought it might help me overcome other hungers, for food and control, at a time in my life where my self-confidence was non-existent. Where every undertaking was fraught with peril.

 To smoke as my father once smoked, as every one of my sisters and brothers once smoked, as most of my friends smoked, brought me into a club of confidence even as I worked in a Community Health Centre where nicotine was on the nose and the filthy habit frowned upon. Even the director of medicine at the Southern Memorial Hospital next door smoked, and all of us indoors. 

Meeting rooms were thick with the fog of cigarette smoke floating above our heads and ashtrays were full to overflowing in all the consulting rooms, even at the front desks for visitors to stub out their cigarettes on arrival. It seemed then that everyone who was anyone smoked, even as the word was well and truly out: smoking was dangerous. It killed. 

For five years I kept up the habit. One New Years Eve – both the man and I had married by then – we decided to stop after we realised how this habit controlled us. But we resumed soon after over an argument about what to cook for dinner, his preference pork chops, or mine, chicken schnitzels.  I stormed off to the shops for yet another pack of Alpines. 

 We made up over cigarettes and more, and in time were back into the habit, until my youngest brother chucked the habit and the guilt bit deeper. Then another good friend followed his wife into not smoking. Our social times together were harder. It was not so okay to light up a cigarette in a restaurant before the meal came when you sat with friends who made conversation with longing and determination in their eyes. For them and with them as a model and with the beginnings of publicity campaigns that nipped at your heels I re-considered the need to stop smoking cigarettes. 

Then I fell pregnant and what was hard became the easiest thing imaginable. On top of which I took to putting the money we spent on cigarettes into a separate account. After three months, we had saved enough money from not buying cigarettes, to take our no longer smoking friends to Stephanie’s Restaurant in Hawthorn. An expensive proposition but we had saved enough for dinner for four, which in those days came in at a whopping $20.00 per head, not including wine, which I no longer drank while pregnant.

For years afterwards I kept the thought alive: if things get too hard, if someone dies or if something feels impossible I can always take up smoking again. These last couple of decades the desire has gone, and I have stopped dreaming of smoking cigarettes. The thought now fills me with a type of terror, as if a single puff of smoke would constrict my airwaves and send me closer to my death.