Wholesome entertainment or the Fourth Horseman?
Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a lively eight-year-old girl. With the holidays upon us, she was hard at work refining her Christmas wish list. Her top requests for Santa? Cooking Mama and Gardening Mama, video games simulating those domestic tasks. (I can’t in good conscience recommend you do this, but if you’d like a nails-on-a-chalkboard video glimpse at each, check out their respective websites here and here.)
Now, I’ll admit to a little knee-jerk anti-video-game reaction to this girl’s enthusiasm, but I also get that this is what The Kids These Days are into. Having a committed gamer in the house, I can also acknowledge that video games aren’t quite the calamitous harbingers of obesity, imbecility, and sunlight-and-fresh-air-deficiency that some have made them out to be. All things in moderation, dontcha know.
But here’s where things got a little weird: Thinking that her wish list was rooted in a real-world interest in the food-prep and veggie-growing arts, I asked her if she had a favorite dish, what she most enjoyed helping mom or dad make in the kitchen. I asked her if the family had a garden, or if she’d grown a pea plant in a milk carton (didn’t we all do that in kindergarten?). What she said surprised me. Actually, it shocked me. (There. My fuddy-duddy credentials are on full display.)
She’d never cooked anything, or coaxed a seed to sprout. She’d never helped bake a cake or picked a ripe tomato off its vine. Never chopped onions, never planted them. And she wasn’t terribly interested in trying. To her, food comes from microwaves and drive-thru windows; the yard is where you keep the grass that no one walks on. Cooking meals and growing the ingredients are activities that take place in a climate-controlled rec room, on a 52″ flat-screen TV.
No disrespect to the girl or her parents, but I couldn’t decide if I wanted to gag, scream, or cry first.
You know that I’m given to frequent bouts of existential angst of the where-are-we-going-and-why-am-I-in-this-handbasket variety, but this really can’t be good. Can it? I’m reminded of Michael Pollan’s piece from a few months back, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” in which he examines our strange modern relationship with food preparation. Pollan points out that cooking has, for so many (most?) Americans, become merely a spectator sport, something we enjoy watching but don’t dare try ourselves. One more fragment of reality moving into the virtual.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the cooking video game will spark an interest in the real deal. Maybe Cooking Mama will lead this little girl to actually cooking with mama. But I don’t hold out much hope. When your tastes are shaped by the hyperbolic–heavily seasoned and processed food, overly loud and flashy entertainment–it’s difficult to change the palate. When extravagance and immediate gratification are your normal, how can you learn to appreciate the subtlety of lightly steamed chard? Where do you get the patience to wait for seed to become sprout, sprout to become stalk, bud to become flower?
For my small part, I’m asking Santa to bring that little girl a love of beets, a yearning for dirt under her fingernails, and an adorable accessory or two. Maybe she’ll be enticed to put down the stylus and pick up a spoon.
Rogue Memory
November 12, 2009 · 1 Comment
Remember that first Birds & Bees talk? The messy and vaguely embarrassing details about how babies are made, and the realization that adults you know–your mom, your dad, anybody with kids–had done those things at least once… It’s all a little shocking, a little fascinating, a little disconcerting. In short, it’s a big deal. It’s one of those milestones you carry with you.
My story is pretty uneventful. Mom gave the usual “when a man and woman love each other very much…” routine, with some G-rated visual aids and lots of dry, boring egg and sperm stuff. Not very unusual, except for one thing: it didn’t happen.
On my last visit home, I recounted my memory of this event. It was pretty vivid: I remembered the book, the floral-print arm chair, the room in my grandmother’s house, how I was sitting… all of which made it that much more disorienting when my mother told me it had never happened. I defer to her memory on this one–after all, I was rather young. But this isn’t the only time that a particularly vivid or cherished or noteworthy memory has been deemed false by someone who ought to share it. But without hard evidence, who’s to say which of us is right?
Memory’s a slippery, slippery thing. It’s not to be trusted, but it’s also frequently all we’ve got.
That conversation made me doubt afresh every memory I think I have about my childhood and adolescence, and there’s a certain bereavement that comes with that. I’ve lost something that may or may not have ever existed, and I’ve nothing for replacement.
But does it really matter if my memory is true or not? Our species has long put great stock in myth, and told it like it was truth. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact of a different sort, and is no less valuable for it.
Mine is a problem of simple semantics: All this time, I’ve said memory and meant historical truth, meant the facts of what came before. Fact has a place at the table, but the guest list is larger still. Memories exist in a kind of no man’s land between fact and fiction, and can’t be made to fit the rules of either. Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
My memories are a map of where I came from, but one that could never get you back to any place I’ve been. You’d be better served by a trail of breadcrumbs–more reliable, and you’d have a snack.
Perhaps this is why we love a good scar–it’s proof, a lasting imprint from our collision with some part of the world. We had substance. We were here. Beats Kilroy doodles.
Memories are of events that have helped shape the person you are, and the memory itself–the distillation of the event, the facts or feelings that stand out from it–continues that work as long as it sticks in your head. So when these movers and shapers can no longer be trusted, what’s a gal to do? Jettison the false-in-facts but true-in-feel in favor of a dry, rote account of what “really” happened? Wax philosophical about how reality is a fluid concept and not subject to the laws of small-minded beings? Wish you’d taken more pictures? Or maybe you just go with it: at the next family gathering, we’ll each have our stories to tell. Maybe some of the ragged edges will match up. Maybe we’ll find a new mythology in the spaces between.
Categories: Commentary + Philosophy
Tagged: barbara kingsolver, memory