18 years

Belle and Sebastian, Italy, and the "glitter of memory"

One of my clearest sense memories from the first year I lived in New York is walking to work on a Saturday or Sunday morning, listening to Belle and Sebastian on my iPod, enveloped by the mingling of two distinct smells: bodega flowers and bacon. The bacon also came from the bodegas, which churned out bacon-egg-and-cheeses, but it got stronger as I approached the restaurant where I worked. I would let myself in the back door to the kitchen, where a couple of line cooks would be prepping for the day’s peanut butter BLTs and Elvises (peanut butter, banana, and honey with optional bacon). I worked at Peanut Butter & Co., the now-closed sandwich shop outpost of the peanut butter brand. (The peanut butter itself you can still find in stores — I recommend the Cinnamon Raisin Swirl flavor.)

I worked the register and the first thing I’d do before we opened was hook up my iPod to the restaurant’s speakers so we could all listen to Belle and Sebastian. I was young and self-centered enough to think that my coworkers would be grateful for this, to believe that every work of art I found to be genius would also seem that way to everyone else — they only needed to be exposed, after which they would thank me for changing their lives. I was genuinely shocked when one of coworkers, a guy who was older than most of us and usually gentle and kind, mocked my music choice by howling, “Fooooooooooooox in the snoooooooooooow.”

I saw Belle and Sebastian again on Wednesday, at the newly and beautifully renovated Brooklyn Paramount, and I thought of that guy when they played Fox in the Snow. When they played The Boy with the Arab Strap, I was transported to those walks to and from PB & Co. When they played Step Into My Office, Baby, when they played If She Wants Me, I was right back there, crossing Washington Square Park. How has it been 18 years?

Watching Stuart Murdoch dance around onstage, I thought, “Wow! 55 and he’s still got it!” And then I realized that the last time I saw Belle and Sebastian, I thought the same thing — that it was amazing how energetic his performance was, given his age. He was 37, the age I will turn on Tuesday.

I don’t feel older. I don’t feel like I know any more. Sometimes I feel like I know less of the important things — back then I could recite poetry by heart.

I just read some of the Yelp reviews of PB & Co., trying to call back more memories of it. I laughed at this comment: “Usual hipster university student types work there, and I get the distinct impression they will continue to work there once they graduate.” I didn’t, but at the time that wouldn’t have sounded so bad to me. I loved my coworkers, one of whom was an FIT student who made me a colorful skirt inspired by the B&S song Electronic Renaissance. I got my first tattoo with those friends. I drank my first margarita with those friends. I stood in line with those friends for hours to get free SummerStage tickets to see Belle and Sebastian in 2006.

2006 was also the first time I went to Italy: Florence, on a school trip, so much art and history crammed in that I barely processed any of it but I loved the city and the food and the coffee. I went back a few years later, by myself. I was in grad school and preparing to write my thesis and had a stack of books to read over spring break. Instead of reading them in rainy Dublin, I booked cheap Ryanair tickets to Rome. I stayed in a hostel and took myself to a few museums — the Keats-Shelley House, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, where I marveled at Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman — but mostly I sat in piazzas and read in the sun. I don’t feel like 18 years have passed since Florence, like 15 years have passed since Rome.

This spring break, I went back to Italy with my family: my husband, our kid, and my mom. We flew into and out of Milan and spent the middle of the week in Emilia-Romagna. All I wanted to do was eat, drink, and go to the Villa Necchi Campiglio, and we did all three.

The reality of travels like these is full of minor discomforts: lack of sleep, bad weather, waiting around for planes and trains, upset stomachs, language barriers. But you go for the good parts, and the good parts were very good.

Knowing I wouldn’t have much alone time, I chose to bring one book on the trip: Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm. Written toward the end of her life and published posthumously, the book is a collection of musings on old photographs, mostly of family but also family friends. Malcolm is so good at questioning — almost invalidating, really — what she calls “the glitter of memory.” “The past is a country that issues no visas,” she says in one of the essays. “We can only enter it illegally.”

I didn’t write at all while we were in Italy, not even to record observations or things we did. I did take photos, which is something I didn’t do on my Florence trip or my Rome trip. I have only my memory to rely on, just as I must rely on my memory to surface my PB & Co. coworkers and our adventures together. I used to have photos from those years, but they were lost in a hard drive crash, along with every photo I took between the time I switched from disposable cameras to digital and the time I started backing up my digital photos.

The memories are, of course, suspect — was Rome really that sunny and warm in April? If I were recording them for a book or an essay, I would interrogate them. But I’m just enjoying them, so I allow myself to be dazzled by their glitter.

And now, back to the routine. This week, Leave is back in my camp for edits. Love to you all.