Memento Mori on a Summer's Day

This picture has been sitting on my desktop for weeks now as I try to process a coherent thought on memory and totems. I'm using the less specific definition of totem, "anything serving as a distinctive, often venerated, emblem or symbol." In an article about Neil Gaiman's Stardust, V.E. Schwab uses the term tokens: "In most stories, but always in fairy tales, an object bestowed [or token] is guaranteed to have importance (think of [Chekov's Gun])." 

Everyone has had a moment when a smell or a picture or piece of music has sent them back to another time and place.  For many, if not most, those memories are happy and nostalgic, because we tend to hold on to the good and forget the bad.

Our culture is not one for memento mori.  And I'm not sure that more paintings with skulls would have any meaningful impact without a cultural context. But not all reminders of death are dead, and not all totems are happy.

I was 'reading' one of the several hundred of those slideshow lists about the nineties— this one about discontinued products. Yes, I remember that. That was so gross. Those commercials were the best. Then one so hazy in my memory, I thought perhaps I had made it up. Something I hadn't seen... possibly since that day so long ago. Sticky, like any popsicle, but better because cartoon characters made everything better. Good on a warm spring day when you've been playing outside. Good for sharing with friends.  I want to keep playing, could you bring out more? No adults to supervise. Nothing to keep kids from playing where they shouldn't.  Kids who don't know why the unsecured manhole cover is dangerous. Who expects a first grader to know how boiler heating systems work? And then—

It's strange to look at something you once liked, that even now you have nothing bad to say about, except that now it holds a greater significance.  For you, it is the opening shot of a movie only you have seen.  Somethings we don't enjoy, some we dislike because their aesthetics don't please us (what's so bad about moist anyway?), and some are totems of from a time when we were reminded of our own mortality.  Sometimes those totems are feared, bad memories from a bad time. And sometimes they merely take us back, reminding us who we once were, who we are now, and how far we've traveled to get here.

Two years ago, while driving back to grad school from summer stock, my dad and I drove through our old neighborhood in Princeton. Our building was still there, but out in front were the bulldozers that would help clear the debris once it was demolished. A picture taken from a car, of a place filled with such mixed memories about to be torn down.

How far we've come from where we once were to where we are now.