Fade with me for a while

me somewhere in the 70s, me on my 40th birthday in the 90s

For just a moment, close you eyes, hear the strum of the Goo Goo Dolls, or Nirvana, or Oasis, smell the cigarette smoke, reach for the flesh colored phone on the wall, and remember who you were in the 90s. This is the collective state of so many people watching the Netflix series, Love Story, the fictionalized retelling of the relationship of JFK Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. For many of a certain age, it isn’t only the tender, heartbreaking story of these beautiful people, but a transportive journey, a reliving of soul defining moments from a time before. The musical strains of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” the idolatry of Kate Moss. The Calvin Klein jeans. It’s remembering shitty apartments, loud clubs, and indiscriminate sex, some of it with a fondness. That feeling, brought back, that anything was possible and everything that mattered was right in front of you. The reminder, sparked in each episode, of what it was like to live untethered in a big and open world. Better, freer. A nostalgia for something lost, and for those who were there, a New York they once knew. It’s a longing, universal, in all of us, though, for the way we were.

I watched a few episodes of the series until I stopped. Until I realized that, for me, it felt like voyeurism. Because, as a child, I was seared with the memory of my school principal walking into the classroom, whispering into my teacher’s ear, the image of my teacher’s stricken face, the tears, the announcement of Kennedy’s assassination. Because before the tragedy of JFK Jr. ‘s plane going down there was the little man saluting the flag draped coffin on the military caisson. Because right about the time of the series release was the death of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg’s daughter, Tatiana. To me, that was the ultimate devastation these people had suffered. Because I read Daryl Hannah’s essay denouncing the twists of the truth of her relationship with JFK Jr. The love of Love Story, seemed to come at the expense of too much pain for the real people it portrayed.

Yet I understand the desire to remember. You don’t even know you are missing the cherished bits of your past until they press through the veil, and there you are, swept away, who you were and where you were in the before.

In the 1990s I was young, but not like John and Carolyn, not breathless and on the cusp. I had well arrived to adulthood, to motherhood, and was a woman changed from the girl I’d been in the 70s and 80s. When I think of the 90s, it’s a blur. It was many times frenetic, frantic. It was me trying to keep it together, do the necessary, adult things, work, wife and mothering. The era of late nights and bad decisions had passed. My style was mom jeans, and popular music was a low hum, the goings on in the greater world only flashes on a screen as I moved through my days, mostly exhausted. It was a time that didn’t feel exactly mine, like I had moved to a supporting role in my life. I saw my children, though, step into the ethos of the era, much as I had in the 60s when a group of us kids went to see A Hard Day’s Night with our summer camp counselor. After that, little beings we were, would never the same.

Because of the wild popularity of the series, I see pictures of Carolyn Bessette all over the internet now, and I look at them and see her transform, see her loose wavy locks straighten, become almost severe, see how the relaxed girl became the retrained woman, the photographs documenting the process of her shedding.

Even in what is now inarguably old age I tend to look forward. I don’t think it’s helpful, or even truthful, to romanticize too much the past. Hard too, because people are gone, places are changed, and it can be sweet and bitter to remember things as they were.

Occasionally, though, like everyone watching Love Story, I find myself wanting, if only for a day, to relive some of the before. To walk in a world messier, more disconnected, and even in some ways, more dangerous. To see ahead and see it boundless, to feel, though, that everything important is right now. And, sometimes, out of the blue, a hint slips through, like a shiver, and I hold it, feel the wistfulness, the home of it, the way it was.

Sharing this Nirvana video because I remember watching the whole Unplugged session in 1993 transfixed, and because, well, you know.