180: Return to Childhood 2001

Ira Glass

Fifth grade-- it was so long ago. Who can remember that far back? Two whole years.

Ira Glass

This is Kayla Hernandez, in seventh grade at the Pulaski School in Chicago. She says that she actually visits her fifth grade classroom, Room 211, and her fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Chan, fairly often, and reminisces about the past.

Ira Glass

Back in fifth grade, she covered her copy of the book with one of those paper book covers with a picture of NSync on it. It was her copy, though they're not allowed to write their name in the front of the books at her school.

Ira Glass

When I asked Kayla which friends that she wouldn't remember at all someday, it wasn't hard for her to answer.

Ira Glass

She's not close to these kids or anything. But as she said their names, it was like watching them vaporize or something. Someday they'd just be gone, erased from the history of her life, like they had never been there in the first place.

We forget most of everything, and then sometimes we go back and try to remember. And really, there is no predicting which people and places and moments we'll be able to get back. Diana and Maria? They could still make the cut.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Return to Childhood. What you find and what you do not find when you go back.

Our show today in four acts. Act one. Once More, With Feeling. In which Jonathan Katz answers the age old question, what happens if you return to your childhood home and it's not so nice, and the current owner tries to sell it to you?

Act two. Punk In a Grey Flannel Suit In which a mortgage broker discovers that his old punk band from the '70s is hot in Japan and decides to leave corporate life for a little bit and go back on tour.

Act three. Ich... Bin... Ein... Mophead. A 34 year old man investigates who he was at nine years old, and learns a thing or two that he would just as soon not remember.

Act four. Every day I forget something else. A ten year old explains memory with the help of novelist Nicholson Baker. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Once More, With Feeling.

You may have heard of this series on Public Radio called Lost and Found Sound, which looks for old tapes to put on the radio. Well, one of the producers who works with that series, Valerie Velardi, knew a man named Jonathan Katz who loves old tapes. Loves them so much that he says that it just puts him in a good mood just to be around audio equipment. Naturally they got in touch. Katz is also a kind of minor celebrity in his own right. He did a TV series for a while about a cartoon psychiatrist called Dr. Katz.

Anyway, Lost and Found Sound had Katz sit down with another one of the producers, a guy named Jay Allison, to play some of these old tapes of Katz's family. And after they did that, Katz then took his little journey into his childhood a step further.

But I'm getting ahead of the story. Here's a few minutes first of him going through his old childhood tapes with Jay Allison.

Jonathan Katz

K, I'm going to put the headphones on and do some serious time traveling. OK, hit play.

Jonathan Katz

I think even as a kid I knew how cheap tape was. If this was recorded today, there would be phones in the background. Somebody would be getting a fax. Somebody else would be checking their email. The TV would be on. It's kind of sad. Can't hear a kid breathe like this.

Jonathan Katz

That's me.

Jonathan Katz

I said "verily."

Jonathan Katz

Lohd.

Jonathan Katz

I have a New York accent in Hebrew, which is pretty tough. Until I did my HBO special, this was the most money I ever got paid to perform live. Just going to move it ahead a little bit, just want to make sure-- whoa. Sorry about that.

Jonathan Katz

Oh, man. I have not changed one bit. That's what life is like at my house. We live, we videotape, and then we watch what we just did.

And I have this obnoxious habit now with my daughter and her friends, both daughters. They can just be sitting around with a bunch of friends and I walk in with a tape recorder, and I go, "OK, talent show!" You know, which if you're 17, is pretty uncomfortable.

Ira Glass

Comedian Jonathan Katz.

Ira Glass

Act Two. Punk In a Grey Flannel Suit.

David Philp is the president of a mortgage brokerage firm in Beverly Hills. As you might imagine, in Beverly Hills, they handle rather large mortgages. He dresses neatly in beautiful clothes. He has clean-cut hair.

But in the 1970s, in his native England, he was in a punk band called the Automatics, which was never really a big commercial success, but known and respected in the history of the punk movement there by people who care about these kinds of things. And last year, through an odd set of connections, he ended up revisiting his teenage years for the first time by going back on tour in a version of his band in Japan. Here is how something like that happens.

Ira Glass

David Philp, lead singer of the Automatics. Though he has not quit his day job, he's been recording in the studio lately, and hopes to tour Germany in the fall.

Why is it that the Axis powers are the ones who are going for this music right now? What is that about?

Coming up, a famous novelist and actress from the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The impossibility of time and memory and a babysitter. It's action, action, action, believe me, in just one minute, from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Return to Childhood. Stories of people revisiting the past, what they find there, what they do not find there.

We have arrived at act three of our show. And this act is the story of how one of the producers of this program made a decision to return to his childhood. Alex Blumberg went searching for somebody named Susan Jordan, who he and his sister Kate and their parents knew for about a year when he was growing up in Cincinnati.

Alex Blumberg

These are the things that I remember about Susan Jordan. Me and her sitting in the back room, telling her about the day camp I went to that summer. I can't get myself to shut up. "And they had alligators, and snakes," I can hear myself telling her. "And this one time, this one alligator got out, and the counselor had to catch it." And on and on, like that.

Me and Susan flipping through one of those Time Life books. Rock and Roll Through the Decades: The Sixties. She has long, brown hair. She's incredibly skinny. It's 1975. She's wearing bell bottom Levis, a faded jean jacket. She points to a picture of a bloated man in a powder blue rhinestone jumpsuit sitting cross-legged on a stage before a crowd of crying women. "That's my favorite picture of Elvis," she says. This information seems somehow personal and important.

Me and Susan riding in her car. I'm going through this phase where I'm trying to notice things. So when we pull up to a stoplight, I start trying to notice the guy on the motorcycle next to us. He apparently doesn't want to be noticed, especially by a peculiar nine year old staring at him through the passenger window. "What are you looking at?" he sneers. I turn around fast and face the dashboard.

"Did he say something to you?" Susan asks. "What did he say to you?"

"Nothing. He didn't say anything. It's fine. Look! Green light!"

"Tell me what he said. What did he say to you?"

I stay silent. I know if I tell her what he said, she'll get out of the car and try to kick his ass. Which scares me, but comforts me, too.

Susan Jordan was our babysitter. She watched my sister and me every day after school for a couple hours until our parents got home from work. We didn't know any adults like her and we loved her. The summer before I started fifth grade, after being with us for a year, Susan got another job.

The last time I saw her was Christmas Eve 1982. I'm 16, a cashier Thriftway Foods, a supermarket in Cincinnati, where I lived. The place is packed. All 25 registers are going. People are lined up halfway to the back of the store. I look up, and there's Susan Jordan.

She smiles. We talk. She doesn't have many items, so I check them through as slowly as I possibly can. I can't recall one thing we say to each other, although I remember being distinctly disappointed to hear that she's married. She hands me some kind of business card, her husband's, probably, something having to do with the building of redwood decks. She seems happy.

Meanwhile there's a line of last-minute Christmas shoppers mounting behind her. I tell her to hold on, I'll try to get my break, we can catch up. She says great, and steps aside. I keep signaling to my manager, but there's no one to relieve me. Five, ten, fifteen minutes pass. I keep glancing behind at Susan, making apologetic gestures. I can still remember her standing there, holding her one bag of groceries, smiling back at me.

Finally she taps me on the shoulder. "I have to go," she says. "But I come in here all the time. I'm sure I'll see you around."

I worked at Thriftway for two more years. I never saw Susan Jordan again.

It drives me crazy that I never saw her again. If I hadn't run into her at the store, I don't think I'd care. But somehow, having her play what, to me, seemed like a huge role in my life when I was a kid, and then getting just a taste of what it would be like to talk with her as a peer-- I've never forgotten that moment.

I know it's ridiculous. But after years of thinking about her, imagining what she's up to, wondering if she ever thinks about me, I decide to find her.

[DIAL TONE]

[DIALING]

[PHONE RINGING]

Alex Blumberg

I start with my only lead. The one former employer of hers that I know.

Alex Blumberg

One of the many ideas that Susan introduced to our household was the concept of the nickname. I think that's all I want to say about Chicken Legs and Mophead.

I'd gone to my mother to fill in gaps in my memory of Susan, but she didn't remember much more than I did.

Alex Blumberg

What talking to my mom did do was make me look at my childhood memories from an adult perspective. Like for example, what I remembered about her living situation.

Alex Blumberg

My mom didn't have any idea where I could find Susan, which made things difficult. Because A, Susan Jordan is a very common name, and B, it's probably not her name anymore. I called the county court records department to find all the Susan Jordans married in Cincinnati. My mom asked a friend who worked for the city to search all the Cincinnati birth records. I contacted high school alumni associations. I asked friends at high-powered newspapers to run background checks.

Finally, there was one former Susan Jordan who stood out. She seemed the right age. She was married, living in a Cincinnati suburb. She had a couple of kids. Her husband was a lawyer. I got her number from information.

And it wasn't until I sat down to call her that it hit me. A phone call from someone you babysat 20 years ago might not be a welcome surprise, but in fact strange and creepy. Here I am practicing sounding benign.

Finally I made the call.

[PHONE RINGING]

Alex Blumberg

It turns out there are a lot of Susan Jordans who don't remember me. A lot. One guy even called his ex-wife, a former Susan Jordan, and then called me back to tell me she'd never heard of me. I was getting nowhere by myself.

So I contacted a professional. One Irving Botwinick, a certified New York City private investigator. Three days after putting him on the case, I got a message saying he'd found her. I called him back.

Alex Blumberg

Susan and I talked for over three hours on the phone, catching up, comparing notes. She asked about my sister, and kids that used to live on the street, and our old family dog. It was amazing how much she remembered and how much we remembered in common. Even small incidents like the time that we were stopped at the traffic light and I stared too long at the guy on the motorcycle.

Alex Blumberg

Susan got married when she was still in college and went to work for the phone company as a repair person. She spent the next 20 years or so hanging from a telephone pole, she said. She hated it, but the money was good. Around the time her first marriage ended, she finally got up the courage to quit and find work using her degree. She now teaches at a special school for mentally ill children. She lives in Florida with her second husband and she seems happy.

Of course, when you dive back into the past like this, you find how partial and incomplete your memory is. First there are the facts you get wrong. Turns out Susan had been a college freshman when she babysat us, not in high school like I thought. My sister remembered she'd ridden a motorcycle. Also not true. And the guy who she got in a fight with over the cats, who in my mind was her hairy '70s boyfriend, turned out to be her roommate's boyfriend.

But besides the facts you change, there are the facts you completely omit. That fight over the cats? Susan had forgotten totally that I'd been there. And it was a little strange, because my presence was the only thing she'd forgotten. Other details she remembered fine, even the names of the cats themselves.

Alex Blumberg

Every time the subject of her hard times came up, I'd hear a subtle hesitancy in Susan's voice. At first I thought it was embarrassment, but that wasn't it, exactly. It wasn't until we'd been talking for hours that I realized what it was.

She was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She hasn't forgotten that her past had happened. She'd just forgotten that I'd witnessed part of it. And her fear became clear, the one that had been gnawing at her our entire conversation, was that I was calling to say she damaged me by exposing me to it.

Alex Blumberg

There are parts of your past you don't want to go back to, parts of yourself you don't want to go back to. And for Susan Jordan, the year of her life that I remember is the year she'd just as soon forget.

And it turns out, I had also done my best to forget what I was like that year. I didn't think of myself this way at all, but Susan Jordan reminded me in the gentlest terms possible. When I was nine, I was anxious and bookish. I was kind of uptight.

Alex Blumberg

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this whole story is how little our memories have deceived us about each other, even if they had deceived us about ourselves. As Susan said at one point, each of us remembered what we needed to about the other. I needed to remember the part of Susan that she doesn't think about much. Her toughness in the face of hardship. She said she mostly remembered a side of my family that I just take for granted-- that it was calm in our house. That there were books. There wasn't much fighting.

Alex Blumberg

You can try to return to childhood by looking at photos, or visiting the old neighborhood, or listening to recordings. Or you can find someone who knew you back then, someone you haven't seen since. They still carry within themselves a picture of you that's unclouded by the years in between. They'll remember you better than you remember yourself, and you can do the same thing for them.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg.

Ira Glass

Act Four. Every Day I Forget Something Else.

Let's end our program today with one of the ideas we began it with. Remember Kayla, the seventh greater who is already aware of how she cannot remember her own past? Well, this very idea comes up in a novel by Nicholson Baker, a really great and unusual novel called The Everlasting Story of Nory. The book is told from the point of view of a nine year old named Nory who, at some point, talks about how hard it is to remember things. Actress Michelle Trachtenberg reads a brief passage for us.

Michelle Trachtenberg

That afternoon, Nory tried to reconstruct every tiny detail of the International Chinese School in her mind. She couldn't even remember all the kids in the class. She remembered one very nice girl named Stephie, who left later on, who had a birthday party at her swimming pool where Nory had floundered into the deep end and had gotten about a gallon and a half of water in her lungs and thrown up a tiny bit on the grass.

She gave Stephie a pair of tiny glass slippers wrapped up in probably the best wrapping paper she had ever drawn. She still thought about those glass slippers. They were paperweights that a glassblower made, but they worked as real doll shoes. They were amazingly wonderful.

It disturbed Nory very much to think that all she was going to know about what happened in her life was not very much at all. You can only really remember the things that happened when you were an older child and the things that happened to you now. That is, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or late last week.

You live your life always in the present, and even in the present, this day, dozens and hundreds of little tiny things happen. So many that by the end of the day, you can't make a list of them. You lose track of them unless something reminds you. Say someone says, remember when you dropped your ruler this morning? And you do remember. But then that is lost in the tangle.

Now, some things you can just accept that you're not going to have the slightest chance of remembering. It would be nice, but you know that it would be basically impossible. For instance, being in your mother's womb, as it's called. Some people thought babies could remember that.

Nory one morning asked Littleguy if he could remember being tucked away in mommy's belly long ago, and he said, "Yes." He said, "It had all things there, in she's tummy. It had things that were called steam trains. It was filled with they. Filled with steam trains, city of Truro, Lord of the Isles, the Mallard. Pictures with steam trains, and toy ones, and jumping things. Filled, filled with they."

Well, of course there weren't toy trains in Nory's mother's womb, unless maybe he was a remembering the small intestine chuffing around. Maybe he was remembering a freight train of food being digested, going around and around him. But probably not.

Still, Nory thought it would be nice if you could think back at least to the age of three. It shouldn't be impossible. Three was older than Littleguy, and Littleguy could understand an amazing number of things. But Nory couldn't go back that far, really, except for a few scribs and scraps. She remembered being eight, and back into being seven, and she went pretty much back to five, and then it teetered a little bit. She only remembered her fourth birthday party, a mermaid party, because she had watched the tape of it a number of times on TV.

One thing, though, she made a point of remembering and passing onto her older self. Every year she got a year older, she said to her parents, "Remember when I was five, I said I was five going on six? Remember when I was six, I said six going on seven? And when I was seven, I'd be going seven on eight. And then going on eight, on nine? Well, now I'm going nine on ten." So each year, the list of years got a little longer. But she remembered the earlier times that way by saying the list over.

Another thing she made sure to bring along every year with her for a long time was the memory that there were many, many little amounts of money that she had found in the car and thought could be hers, but maybe not. Or times her parents had bought her a doll outfit or something when she told him she would reimburse them later, when they got home, with her own money. Or gifts she bought other people with her own money. But borrowing it from her parents, since she'd forgotten her purse. She would skip a week, not thinking to it, then still remember it, and bring it into the next week. Then skip a week, then bring it over.

Finally, she couldn't keep the amount in her head, because it had been added onto and subtracted from so much. And it began to pull at her. And she thought, "I know. I'll pay them $100 when I grow up, and that will surely make up for anything I've borrowed along the way. Then she didn't have to keep track of that.

Ira Glass

Michelle Trachtenberg, who plays Buffy's little sister and a portal and a key on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reading an except from Nicholson Baker's Everlasting Story of Nory.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Blue Chevigny, Starlee Kine, Erin Yanke, and Annie Baxter. Senior producer Julie Snyder, consigliere Sarah Vowell, production help from Todd Bachmann.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

Ira Glass

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

Ira Glass

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who you know, he tells me, he has played Japan, too. He swears.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.