I’m sitting in my mother’s living room still recovering from yesterday’s red-eye to New York only hours removed from the impending funeral of my great aunt. Needless to say I’m emotionally unbalanced. I have a very small family to begin with and with her death I can now count the members of my family on my mom’s side that are older than I am on one hand. Maybe it is the churning of memories, the slow movements through my aunts house, even the pulse of the city itself that reminds me of how I grew up. Each moment here is draped in memory, and the more I remember things the more confused I get. For starters, where did black Santa come from?
Its a curious question to be sure. It popped into my head while sitting here looking at a black santa doll, a remnant of this year’s christmas to be sure. The thing is, there was no black santa when I was growing up. There was no Kwanzaa either. The holiday was formed before I was born but it didn’t gain any real traction until I was at least ten. Being here and seeing all these new traditions makes the past feel distant and in many ways false–as if I couldn’t have come from this place and these people whose new customs I do not know.
The death of loved ones makes matters even worse because Aunt Darlie was the memory keeper; the person who knew what happened, didn’t happen, and how things unfolded for our entire family. It was her self-directed and very important role and now there isn’t anyone out there to fill that. So I wind up feeling like a person who grew up in a history that no longer exists–one that has been replaced by modern responses to commercial holidays and gentrified neighborhoods. I’ve become a tourist in my own childhood. Strange feeling there.