Flags waving in a winter breeze. Photo by Deborah Stokol, Argentina, 2010.

Based on the memories of my uncle, “Tio,” Alberto (or my reimagination of the inherited narrative of a reimagination)

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

We were young. It was the Buenos Aires of 1950. The Spanish Civil War was so recent all the Argentinean Spaniards (of which there were many) still divided themselves into those two requisite–passionate–camps of “Nationalist” and “Republican.” Hemingway and Orwell weren’t yet part of the canon; the things they described were more news than they were fictional responses to history.

His family, of course, belonged to the Republican camp. They were sophisticates. It could not have been any other way.

The San Telmo of then had more character. But then, poorer neighborhoods tend to have “character” before they become trendy, expensive—gentrified. So it was with San Telmo—that bastion of tenement living, those conventillos that piled bedroom onto squalid bedroom, human onto yet foreign human, til they surrounded the gritty central courtyard. But I loved it.

Now, “artists” fight for lofts there, and the flea market is as legendary as it is overpriced. Each dulce de leche-filled crepe costs $6 pesos. I can’t even imagine what that would have bought us. People were more careful with their money. But that was a different time, and things were different then.

American folks and saucer-eyed students flock there in droves. “I love Buenos!” they proclaim with enthusiasm, christening the city with a name no native would call its worn streets. They bandy their scarves and silver earrings, their new love for the bandoneon and the exchange rate. But we’re grateful they visit.

I don’t miss the past. But “lo añoro.” That is to say, I’m wistful; I yearn. Those years were grand—those years of adolescence and idealistic intellectualism. He and I had been such good friends, and we were young.

His name was Eduardo Luz-Stratford*—the ‘Luz’ a product of his father’s Spanish heritage, the ‘Stratford’ a badge of English pride. Like me, he was 16. But unlike me, he expressed his indolence with fervor, practically sounding his cultured yet Barbaric yawp from the rooftops of San Telmo.

His house lay but four blocks from my parents’ apartment, but it seemed to inhabit a distant country. A palacette it was—at least at first glance. Small when compared to Xanadu, it was a palace nevertheless. His parents, Francophiles like most, had built it in the modern “French” style, and it offered a staircase I thought of as ‘ambitious.’ I peered at its infinity with wonder. But the wonder I sustained for that staircase was nothing when compared to the one I held for the house’s shocking interior.

It was a disaster. I couldn’t reconcile the building’s outside with the raucous chaos taking place within its otherwise majestic- seeming walls. These folks ran a publishing house and clearly had money.

But from the looks of it, they had disavowed their material goods or just could not recognize their heads from their asses (or the manner in which the first had found itself lodged so deeply within the second).

The sofas looked like they’d been clawed by a thousand feral cats. The Argentinean penchant for exaggeration even fails me here. But allow me to convince you that torn wallpapers, dirt-covered floors, bric-a-brac tossed indeterminately and clearly without care across the entirety of floor are simply the commencement of a long list of human messes riddling the interior of the Luz-Stratford home.

The house had four, no five, floors. I’d never before seen the like and have never since seen it. Eduardo took it all as a matter of course. The only “course” to which he paid any heed.

“Come on!” I’d shout from outside. “We’ll be late for school!” But his father, bedraggled and amused, a permissive robe-wearer, would simply seek his son and ask whether he wanted in on that whole high school thing, shrugging to me as if to say “no dice; que se joda.”

The pair would invite me in, and I, responsible young man that I was, would refuse, guarding my dignity while pronouncing the importance of an institutional education.

And I stuck to my guns for a few days, but before long, I’d entered that house, that sanctuary of sloth, ascended those imposing stairs. Climbing my way to the highest reaches, I found a sort of paradise.

Eduardo ushered me into a world of philosophy and depth, a world of auto-dictaticism and “who needs school, anyway?” There was cigarette smoke, and through its prophetic clouds, I could see that these were the happiest days of my life.

I was larger than life; I was invincible. I was 16.

And the basement of that house would have left Aladdin slack-jawed and mute. Piles of dusty novels filled the large room. In the center of this treasure lay a ping-pong table, and we alternated between edification and competition. Late at night, the sound of the paddle hitting the ball would echo in my head as the words of the books I’d read would swim before my closed eyes and lull me to sleep.

We smoked and played chess. We’d engage in these games all day, fancying ourselves young Zweigs or Jack Londons. We’d play for hours. Sometimes I’d play white, others, black. The game would absorb us.

I’ve never played again, cannot. The association’s too fixed, the game too central to a time gone. It exists only in my memory now.

Eduardo would read, and he’d lead me through his maze of books. We were leftists; we were idealists. Peron was in power—the first time. We hated him.

I became intimately acquainted with Hesse and with Maugham, and with their love of Eastern philosophy. Eduardo and I attempted to lose our corporeal shells, tried to free our souls to visit the stars as their protagonists had. And with a pang, we felt our hopes crash down, dead or disappointed, as our souls went nowhere our bodies could not.

I stopped going to school.

Eduardo, his father, another friend and I would sequester ourselves in the house, surrendering our minds to the life lessons taught by these masters. We blew smoke rings like the men we thought we were and transcended materialism in the arms of literature. We were thinkers; we were wonderers; we were young.

And then one day, my head cleared.

I emerged from the palace to choose university. I studied civil engineering, made new friends, read the new—exciting!—words of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, serialized each week in the magazines I eagerly tore off the racks and raced home to read.

But even at school, I worshipped at the altar of my recent memory, every day yearning for that golden time with Luz-Stratford, my philosopher friend. I itched for vacation time, for the moment I would come home to “Baires,” as we called it.

And that moment finally came. I traveled home during a school break, eager to meet him and to return to the life I’d left behind.

But things were different now. The boys had changed, seemed immature, stagnating in a mire of their own making. Their goals seemed childish, their dreams, irrelevant.

Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t they who’d changed, but I. I heard their talk, found it irritating, the ceaseless chatter of the aimless. I had different dreams and new goals now.

I have a wife, three children, five grandchildren and a father-in-law. My old friends lived a certain dream but refused to awaken from its pall. I likened them to those dwelling in opium dens. Their ways intoxicated me like the drug, but I found them too heavy, superfluous, unhealthy.

Eduardo’s since written many books. I’ve long since stopped poring over fiction, and I stopped smoking after my second heart attack. I am still an engineer.

But that time—-that time to me is still golden. Eduardo may have changed. Or perhaps I did. Yet those moments, filled with chess and books, smokes and invincibility, remain preserved in the mausoleum of my memory, enthroned like the mummies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where one daughter once lived and my son still does. I find those bandaged recollections beautiful. Because we were young.

*This name has been changed.

Green-Eyed Face(book)

By Deborah Stokol

I remember when it was new. When no one had heard of it. When no one was “on it.” When some classmate told me to join this cool new site just for college students and to “friend” him too. For some reason, we figured, keeping something “webby” at the college-level somehow made it less sketchy than were Myspace or the erstwhile Friendster. Faulty logic. Because, of course, college kids have never been creepy. Anyone heard of a rufie?

Frankly, I thought the whole thing, including the name, seemed kind of silly, but I joined on a lark. It was 2004, and we were amongst this new generation of soon-to-become social networking site junkies who signed up initially apathetic before quickly morphing into feverish, gibbering addicts.

Now, we’ve returned to that initial state of apathy. What’s more, many of us find it loathsome—a drain on our time and a recipe for insecurity and needless self-comparison.

I have begun to fear logging on to Facebook because of the way it makes me feel.

It’s not just that (legitimate) fear of invasion of privacy or of facing the mindless din friends make by posting how gleeful they are to “have done laundry!” or that they “have a headache “ Nor is it of reading the bad grammar, the inanity, the relentless over-sharing or the cryptic, self-pitying updates like “And what was the point? Why did I make this decision? So many changes, and now I’m wallowing in a pit of despair.”

It’s much more than that. The site’s constant reminder of others’ activities makes its users hyper-aware of insecurities that might otherwise remain latent.

Facebook is the home of self-aggrandizement and the shameless plug. Yet those uncertain of their professional standing, and those feeling they have not reached that chimera–“potential”–will cave to the near-primal envy evinced by such status updates as “[x] got her dream job!!!!!!! She’s soooo excited!!!!!”—especially if that “dream job” happens to be your dream job too.

Where we once relied on hearsay or more direct, if slower, means of communication, we may now voyeuristically view our peers’ progress at all times.

Those logging on view a page full of friends’ status updates as soon as they enter the site. So we can never escape our contacts’ accomplishments–or what we perceive as such.

Similarly, only with difficulty can those most affected rise above those angry reactions or the resentful feelings that that should have been them or that somehow, they veered off course.

I can’t count the number of texts friends have sent me running along the lines of “Omg*, Facebook just left me so depressed. Everyone’s married, happy and has adorable babies.”

It’s easy to feel like a “failure” if all you can see is that delicate, prismatic view people choose to present of their lives. And it’s easier still to fall into a trap—that of thinking their lives better, fuller, infinitely more exciting and more complete than is yours.

It got so bad for a close friend that she asked me to be the keeper of the keys. She gave me her password, and I had to change it to a new one she didn’t know. She requested I intervene that she not log onto what she termed an insidious site and feel the despondence that washes over the one who has weighed herself against others and found herself wanting.

I can be certain of my post-Facebook bad mood because if I compare myself to others and find myself somehow better off—literally or existentially—then I feel ashamed of my uncharitable thought processes and see myself as unkind.

If, on the other hand, I find myself worse off, the immediate dejection will set in.

Of course, there is a solution for the users who wish neither to deactivate their accounts nor to purge contacts.

I, and folks I know, have taken to “hiding” “friends.” This means you can prevent those contacts you’re not really sure you should have accepted or even really know or who—most relevantly—provoke that painful self-comparison and displeased reaction, but whom you don’t want to “de-friend” (a pointless insult, in my eyes), from showing up on that front page you see each time you enter Facebook.

The process is quick, painless and discreet. The hidees will never know. I’m sure friends have hidden me, but thankfully, I can’t be sure.

Unfortunately, it has come to this. It’s sad, really, that a site meant to foster human contact can encourage such jealousies and feelings of low self-worth.

But if it aims to mimic real life, it succeeds in including the gamut of multi-emotion-eliciting situations. And after all, it is the enemy we know. Until there’s something new.

*Omg has become the shortened vernacular for “Oh my God.”

Losing them, of course, does not negate the fact that the things they represent occurred. That would be too heartbreaking. But while everyone’s always talking about good memories versus bad ones, or vivid ones rather than the hazy, I think there’s another set as well.

There are those at which we can look, view them as if they’re movies we’ve conjured (that we must watch alone–because, alas, even a memory recounted cannot perfectly match the one another has kept in his or her brain), perhaps thinking it seems such things transpired in another life or in that of a stranger.

I think these are the most common.

But memories adopt another form. Once in awhile, if we’re lucky (lucky, of course, only if the memory is a good one), memories can take the shape of the present, allowing us to step into their realm, reliving again the things within. And when that happens, when chance has awarded us the ability to experience a happy moment again rather than watching it as if through that glass darkly, it is a second life–and a gift indeed.

The Odyssey (Homer)
Ulysses (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)

…and perhaps, at the end, the fantasy-like quest with a Wagner-like and Scandinavian spin: The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkein). With or without it, I think it’s a win-win.

She wore a little yellow button as a pendant and was one of about 10 folks smoking on a Hipster-house balcony in Echo Park. Her army jacket bore a tiny white button pin with “I love Helvetica” written on its face.

Every guest seemed to approach the night, his or her dress, life with a sense of converse-clad irony that when lumped together in army-like form produced the status quo that defied that original social commentary. They all seemed to shop at Urban Outfitters–a store selling an iconoclastic lifestyle that can’t be so iconoclastic if it’s expensive and mainstream.

I was miserable. I don’t mind being “the observer” at social gatherings, or at least I usually don’t. Of course, I’d much prefer not to be, or to brave that situation facing the possibility of sharing my insights with another of my camp–stranger or no.

But, alas, I was alone–existentially. I felt like the only person in a crowded room getting a big joke. And not only were the guests not getting the joke, they didn’t seem to know there was one.

Music and lyrics by Deborah Stokol, April 2010. Performed by Deborah Stokol, April 2010.

So Don’t Believe Me

You told me
you don’t mind
that I called you on the line

But I know I should have
held off
since we’re done

And though it warmed me
to hear you
hear you say
that you missed me
that you missed me
every night and every day

I should have held off
here because
now I can imagine her
with her smell
and her hair
upon your sheets

It’s alright;
it’s not your fault
It was I who said ‘let’s stop’
but there’s nothing I can do now here but cry

So don’t believe me
when I say
when I say that I’m ok
’cause I miss you every night and every day

And there’s nothing we can do
we can do
but face our lives
we’re apart
and time will pass us
any way

So don’t believe me
when I say
when I say that I’m ok
’cause I miss you every night and every day.

Photo by Deborah Stokol, April 2010. Venice Canals, topsy turvy.

Peek. Photo by Deborah Stokol, Santa Monica, 2010.

Surprise. Photo by Deborah Stokol, East Los Angeles, 2010.

Santa Muerte, a harsh taskmistress. Million Dollar Pharmacy. Photo by Deborah Stokol. Downtown L.A., 2010.

Trailing. Photo by Deborah Stokol. Santa Monica, 2010.