My Retro Days

This post is by Della Marinis*

My mother named me after Della Street, the name of the secretary on the Perry Mason show, which isn’t fascinating in itself, but might hint at the general era of my birth. If you don’t know the T.V. program, I was born to a world in fast transition from black and white to technicolor, or as another worn cliché goes, when JFK was still alive but not for much longer.

Of course that wasn’t really ‘my time’ because I was just a baby and had as much chance of remembering it as I would have of WWII – when I was in split cell form amongst two people or possibly, walking around as somebody else that had only a decade of life left to go.

‘My time’ began nine years or so after this vague birth-moment, on a day in my third grade class when I suddenly became self-aware – as if I hadn’t been fully cognizant before that. As though I’d only just stepped out onto the planet and been introduced to its random, awkward ways. And my ways too, which beforehand, I didn’t even know I had.

I had just finished writing 1970 1971 at the top of a piece of loose-leaf paper. My handwriting was curly and unpractised and I made a mental note to change it. A good idea, I thought – and a new idea that was occurring to me for the first time. Then I made a second, more pressing mental note to remember to write 1971 and not 1970 anymore, which I had been doing for a long time previously. So I wouldn’t have to cross it out. This was also a good idea, as well as somehow, a brand new concept.

Maybe life is just too fast from zero to eight or nine, or we’re preoccupied with other life-gripping moments of interest besides ourselves – too young to formulate those mental footnotes on life, the kind of musings and schemings known as contemplation.

What interests me now is how and when those first cognizant moments come back to me. They’re always happy, random images – wispy in thin sun streams or dappled on orange wallpaper. Maybe they have that aura because they’re out of the 70s. Or maybe that’s just the color and flavor of my own personal dawn.

What I know is that they’re triggered by music, though not the music I knew at the time, but what I’ve come to discover in the recent past (i.e., the last 10-15+ years, owing to my more distant birth-moment c. Perry Mason show). Groups like Air
and Boards of Canada, whether because of their synthesizers or analog equipment or I-don’t-know-what-I’m-actually-hearing mix-up – all go down with me like a capsule of 70s retrograde. They bring back images that don’t support a proper sentence, but make a winsome collage, anyway –

A picnic table with friends eating hot dogs

in powdery afternoon light

while my brother washes his Gremlin in the drive

and tunes Battle of Evermore in on FM

lemon yellow is lathering into blue

as the day turns many hours to dusk

and I’m out catching fireflies in a mayonnaise jar

having pulled on my white, patent-leather boots

with zippers, and taking

a deep breath of the never-been-as-fresh-before

nor-will-ever-be-again,

Summer air


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*Della Marinis is my fabulous, Berlin dwelling cousin. She writes young adult fiction, has been a teacher, a toiler in the HR fields, has two amazing kids, a tremendous husband (Martin), is fluent in Dutch and German and she's 9 kinds of wise and funny besides. I'll be posting some of her short fiction here soon.