Recently I was watching this documentary about a summer festival in Harlem back in 1969. The turnout at the time was huge and the performers all legendary in their own right—but in the ensuing years, the documentary details how this event was largely forgotten. You get to watch tons of footage and interviews from the performers to the attendees. All told, the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was something that people walked into without really knowing beforehand that they were taking part in something really special.
The show closes out with a short commentary from one of the spectators. He’s just been shown some of the footage from over 50 years ago and he has tears in his eyes. He pauses, and then he laughs. He says:
“it’s funny. You put memories away and you don’t realize…sometimes you don’t even know if they’re real. So [in rewatching these clips} it’s almost confirmation that what I knew is real. Confirmation…and not only that….how beautiful it was.”
The documentary ultimately won an Academy Award—and it is excellent and most deserving—but it was really that parting comment that stuck with me. How he spoke about his memories being validated for what they were…even if in the passage of time he might have started to doubt that they were truly that amazing. That special.
Of course as the decades wear into our skin, we’ve all experienced and then moved on from highpoints in our lives. Real moments of joy, however fleeting. You savor them, but then life continues and you have to move on to other stuff that requires your attention. And then suddenly it’s ten years later. Or 54 years later. Stuff gets blurry.
In that same vein, there are skills or routines that we have picked up along the way and some go dormant from either disuse or non-necessity. Like a cherished memory, after a while you can start to question whether you ever really had it in the first place (for me right now, that’s living with feeling horrified every time I open my mouth to speak French- grazie, Italia). I know full well that this is all a part of aging, but that spectator’s comments have really stuck with me.
I remember when I was 18 and backpacking around Europe with my friends. Only two years before, I had lived in the south of France for a year—largely left to my own devices as we would cut school and try to ride the public bus without paying (we were, indeed, stupid 16-year-olds). On weekends we’d also go into the mountains to either ski or simply hike around. It was like I had been dropped into wonderland, although I had no idea that this would happen when I signed up to go. The sentiment of existing in that space at that age was best summed up by a fellow exchange student one day while we were walking in the Belledonne mountain range. She suddenly exclaimed, “I am standing on an Alp!” We made fun of her enthusiasm in a good-natured way….but we were totally on board with her jubilation.
Fast-forward to two years later and those memories are already feeling faded and surreal. On that backpacking trip we took a train to the south. It was the first time for my travel companions, but as soon as the train curved into the valley, I caught a glimpse of the Chartreuse mountains. I know those contours. I could not stop scanning my surroundings. I probably looked like one of those video clips showing a poor dog that keeps looking to and fro, unsure of what to make of a situation. That was me on the train. But it was not because I didn’t know what to make of my surroundings—but rather, it was me starting to process what I had experienced as a dumb exchange student in a French lyceé…it was all real. My doubts had vanished. And all of the memories and emotions felt validated.
I’d like to think that a great adult dining table conversation would be to go around the table and ask everyone for an example of a memory like this. It can be big or small—ephemeral or lasting for years—but all the same, we all have them.
I think too about that concert goer and how he explained that we all put memories away. I’m a proponent of this, if only because I am not sure that I could be as fully functional and present as I am if I didn’t compartmentalize—but I would say that it’s important to remember to give sunlight to certain memories. We’ve all got so much stuff going on that things get lost in the daily tides. It’s important to conjure these up, I think, if only to validate them and thus validate these pieces of ourselves. I was a part of the Black Woodstock. I once spent the day wandering Paris alone as a 16-year-old and managed to meet up with my airline pilot Dad…. before the advent of smartphones. Short clips of memory that makes us as the older Self smile inwardly.
I can’t recommend the documentary enough. The music is not only good, but important both in that era and today. And the fact that the creators managed to give it such a broader appeal makes it even more special to me. It reminds me to shake off any doubt that something that I may have experienced years ago really was that good. That unusual. Or that singular. I’d encourage everybody else to give a think back to what they’ve got sitting around in their mental card catalogue…gathering dust.