LOSING SIGHT OF THE PAST

"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it." —

Michel de Montaigne

Memories are not discrete and concrete, they are imbued with our emotional needs at the moment of remembering. We peer into them as though they were gemstones, each facet revealing a different detail, brought into the light. It is a fascinating fact about memory that no two memories are ever the same. William James called it a "stream of consciousness" for a reason.

In a personal history essay in the New Yorker magazine about her father, Rivka Galchen remembered him “saying to me that the first 18 years of life are the most meaningful, and the years after that, even considered all together, can’t really compare.” I don’t disagree.

For me, whenever I imagine the future, I first retreat to the past, seeking context and meaning. When I was of the age Mr. Galchen considered crucial, abundance was represented by our duck boat full of potatoes in the cellar. It was our granary, our calorie bank, sustenance, survival.

It was a small boat, barely enough for two men to sit athwart, which I remembered with Chesapeake or Labrador retrievers in the front, noses twitching with anticipation, the boat patched with layers of dark tar like a Rothko painting.

Ducks and other waterfowl were a frequent secondary food source for us, mostly because in the Fall the mallards, teals, Canada geese, the occasional snow goose, passing south through the Mississippi Flyway, fattened with grain and low-flying easy targets, stored up the delicious fat that my mother canned with shredded pieces of their meat — the confit. Duck fat was an important constituent of many potato dishes. It was fitting that those versatile starch lumps were stored in the decommissioned duck boat.

Duck hunting was among my most-dreaded activities. I remember the aching cold of crouching in a blind or hidden in the boat among the cattails on West Mud Lake or the upper reservoir in the pre-dawn darkness waiting for first light, the quacking of the duck calls, the way my father could cup his hands and make a credible call without the wooden device with its thin wooden reed. His friend Max Huff’s dogs quivering with anticipation. The ducks arriving at the cluster of decoys, wings tucked as they came in low for a landing, silhouetted against the low winter morning sun. Then before they could alight, 12-gauge shots barked out, muzzles flashed, the dogs yelped with joy as they plunged into the ice-chunked lake, their confident strokes as they soft-mouthed the limp ducks.

Ok, come to think of it, aside from the bone-rattling chills there was a certain charm to it.

The reason I bring it up is that Ojai seems wracked by a moment of immediacy bias — we succumb to the outrages of the moment, the moral fevers and panics, and forget the long-term conditions that got us to this point. In the case of the Ojai Unified School District, we kept putting off that moment of reckoning. As the school enrollment continued to decline, no one had the courage to close the schools that have led us to the budget deficit. It's a political hot potato — every school has its constituency who will protest long and loudly to save it from the chopping block. And the fevered mobs with recalls and "off with their heads" — (in this case our estimable superintendent) — miss the point. If there is any point to democracy (the jury is still out, that's how democracy works), then it is that we all share in the blame when things go wrong. And share the responsibility to set them right. It is painful to see Ojai so inflamed, so willfully blinkered to each other's sense of mutual obligation. Both the city and schools are suffering from structural forces beyond our capacity, (Ojai growing older, richer and fewer) but we've been through worse (fires and floods). And that is why we need the past. If you don't know where you've been, how can you know where you're going?

Grown in Birmingham, aged in Ojai, wine producer Nigel Chisholm has always treated the community like family. First, with his celebratory dining and entertainment experiences and now with Feros Ferio Winery; wines so fine they bear the ancient Chisholm motto…

“I am fierce with the fierce.” ferosferiowine.com