The Film of Memory

Some fragmented thoughts on a trip with my nephew and a harvest of dried beans

Thursday, September 1
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Hola, dear reader.

I returned home yesterday from a trip with my nephew Caleb. 

A while back, Caleb, who is 14, texted me to ask if we could go somewhere together. When I asked where, he said someplace hot, maybe a national park. Then he suggested Hawaii, and I said a super-quick no to that. I applaud his ambition, though; dream big, I guess.  

Travel is one of my great delights. I’m lucky to have seen so much of the world, and also, as a journalist who writes about travel sometimes, to be able to call some of my adventures “work.” But this trip was different: To be able to combine “traveler” with “uncle” added a layer of meaning that I’m still only beginning to unpack.

After I counted up my airline miles and hotel points, we ended up on St. John—more than half the island sits within Virgin Islands National Park. Caleb snorkeled and paddle-boarded in the water while I chased shade across the beach. We hiked. We crisscrossed the island, up and down the steep hills, navigating the hairpins and switchbacks while trying to remember to stay on the left side of the road. Then we ended the trip with a city day, in San Juan, Puerto Rico; we explored the old colonial-era forts at the San Juan National Historic Site, ate gelato right before lunch, and walked until my legs ached.

Hiking the Ram’s Head Trail on St. John

Though we were gone for just five days, a trip can’t be so easily bracketed by time. The great travel writer Ryszard Kapuściński once observed that “a journey... neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.” I rarely make travel plans last-minute, not because I’m neurotic—okay, it’s partly because I am neurotic—but mainly because that would deprive me of the pleasure of exploring possibilities. So much of the joy of the journey comes from the imagining: What might we do? Where might we eat? 

Not everything went as planned or imagined. Some surprises were delightful, including the other creatures we encountered: stingrays while snorkeling, the red-footed tortoise that met us mid-hike down the Reef Bay Trail, the wild donkeys that just stood in the middle of the road and stared at us, as if to ask, “What are you doing here?” Others were annoying; I’d had my heart and stomach set on eating goat curry, but the one restaurant that my online research had recommended was closed. And though we saw lots of live goats, I never found the cooked ones on any other menu.

The last part of the Kapuściński quote hints at the enduring hopes I had for this trip with Caleb. “The film of memory,” as Kapuściński puts it, never replays in its entirety or in isolation. It comes back in snatches and snippets, refracted through whatever we later experience. It returns in brief moments and tiny bits, retrieved by new happenings that echo the old. Its meaning is shaped and reshaped by what comes after, like a layer of sedimentary rock that is formed and reformed by the next.

I can’t tell you what Caleb’s takeaways from the trip are now or will be later. Anyway, his story isn’t mine to tell. But I can share a few of my hopes. 

I hope that, with some time away from his brothers and his sister, he understood how much he matters, in his particularity and with his own gifts and quirks. 

I hope that our adventure helped him to see a little more of the vastness of the beauty of the world. 

I hope that he understands that he isn’t just my nephew; he’s also one of my teachers. I learned from him on this trip. One lesson, for instance, was about how to take pictures age-appropriately. During one hike, he asked me to take a photo of him. “But not like old people, who say, ‘1, 2, 3, smile,’” he said. “Don’t do that. Just take the picture.”

I hope that, in glimpsing the wonder of all that’s beyond his usual surroundings, he has come to a richer appreciation of the goodness of his ordinary too.

Caleb paddle-boarding on Hansen Bay

Next time Caleb dives into a swimming pool, maybe it will remind him of the magic of swimming with the sea turtles in Maho Bay. If a cooling breeze greets him as he trudges downfield during soccer practice, it might stir a recollection of the welcome wind that soothed us as we hiked the Ram’s Head Trail. Next time he eats rice and beans, perhaps the flavors will be deepened by the memory of the meal we shared in Old San Juan. (The restaurant is called Deaverdura; it’s not fancy, they don’t take reservations, and you’ll probably have to wait in line for quite a while as we did, but I don’t think you’ll regret it.)

If I see pernil on the menu, I will probably order it

One other thing I hope for: that my nephew knows that he is so very loved—to St. John and San Juan and beyond. 

So many of this world’s wounds are inflicted by people who haven’t been loved well. The only real and lasting treatment for this metastatic pain is the balm drawn from a deep reservoir of love—generous, life-giving, gentle, and patient love. If Caleb is loved well, and if he knows it, then he’ll radiate that love out into the world. 

What I’m Growing: In the days before my trip, as I raced through my to-do lists so that I could focus on my nephew, I’d made only quick visits to the community garden. I’d stay just long enough to water and to harvest some flowers and tomatoes. Even though I knew the dried beans were ready for picking, I didn’t have time.

Correction: I didn’t make time. 

Sometimes people act as if not doing something is the same as leaving things as they are. That’s just not true. To not do something is a choice, and choices have consequences. Change is an inevitability, and ecosystems have no use for our good intentions or our postponed plans. Before I left town, we’d had a good stretch of dry weather. Then, while I was away, thunderstorms visited. And the plants did what they were designed to do.

Plants exist with singular purpose: They grow, they blossom, they produce the seeds of the next generation, and then, as they die, they return nutrients to the soil to prepare the ground for their progeny. The storms that arrived over the weekend knocked some of the fading plants over, and their rains softened some of the bean pods, which split and released the beans.

As I worked my way down the rows this afternoon, pushing weeds out of the way to find bean pods, I noticed some of the liberated beans on the ground. Several were already sprouting. Absent my interventions, they had just moved on with life as they knew it.

Despite my neglect, despite my choices, I think we’ll still get a pretty robust bean harvest. Last year, we got two meals. This year, I’m hoping for at least three.

What I’m Reading: It can be so easy to glance at the headlines and forget that faraway current events are things that affect real people. One year on from the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, so many of us have moved on—but the people of that country continue to reckon with the aftereffects of the American misadventure in their land. This isn’t to say I have any clue as to what should or could have been done. Yet we ought not to pretend that the story is over. This deeply reported, extraordinarily humanizing New York Times profile of a member of Afghanistan’s national women’s football (okay, fine, soccer) team does a painfully beautiful job of returning us to a recognition of the families that are still trying to rebuild their shattered lives.

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I could write more, but then I might not get this to you today or this week or ever. But I do have one question for you: What’s a trip that holds special meaning for you, where “the film of memory” retrieves the sense of belovedness? I’d love to know.

As ever, I’m so grateful we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

Yours,
Jeff

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