Mark Lamoureux's "On Becoming Human"
The following is from a post at Mark Lamoureux's <[[[[[[-[[[[0{:}0]]]]-]]]]]] website (incidentally, the title is pronounced "<[[[[[[-[[[[0{:}0]]]]-]]]]]]"). The post is entitled "On Becoming Human", and it merges a discussion of Lamoureux's youth and the breakup of his parents' marriage with a personal essay on the effect comics had on him. Highly recommended.
Sometime around my father's 45th year, he began seeing his childhood sweetheart. The problem was that he also had a wife and a child at the time. But the strength of those old memories that were once so dear to him and had been forgotten for so long was so great that they split his life in two. I watched my father and my soon-to-be stepmother travel a gauntlet of embarrassing nostalgia: they listened constantly to Buddy Holly and Patsy Cline records, watched nothing but old films from the 50's or films which dealt with 50's culture like The Big Chill and Back to the Future. The anthem of their relationship became the film Somewhere in Time, in which the protagonist wills himself into the past to woo an actress from a photograph with whom he is obsessed. They frequented those restaurants and stores around Connecticut that had remained relatively unchanged since the 50's. To a 12-year-old whose family existed in the present and had been disrupted, this behavior was beyond disgusting.
[Note: the post link will bring you to the May archives of Mark's blog. You then have to scroll down to the May 11 entry. You can't miss it.]
Sometime around my father's 45th year, he began seeing his childhood sweetheart. The problem was that he also had a wife and a child at the time. But the strength of those old memories that were once so dear to him and had been forgotten for so long was so great that they split his life in two. I watched my father and my soon-to-be stepmother travel a gauntlet of embarrassing nostalgia: they listened constantly to Buddy Holly and Patsy Cline records, watched nothing but old films from the 50's or films which dealt with 50's culture like The Big Chill and Back to the Future. The anthem of their relationship became the film Somewhere in Time, in which the protagonist wills himself into the past to woo an actress from a photograph with whom he is obsessed. They frequented those restaurants and stores around Connecticut that had remained relatively unchanged since the 50's. To a 12-year-old whose family existed in the present and had been disrupted, this behavior was beyond disgusting.
[Note: the post link will bring you to the May archives of Mark's blog. You then have to scroll down to the May 11 entry. You can't miss it.]
posted by Finn Harvor at 10:33 PM
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