The feeling that no English word describes

Estimated read time: 14 minutes

I watched Stephen King's 11.22.63 miniseries with the only other drunk redneck remaining, Keith. 

Ok, quick review for readers who may not have seen the show.  It was ok and entertaining for me.  Keith loved it.  He thought it was a beautiful love story with a supernatural/sci fi element and he'd watch it again.  I thought Stephen King saw the movie, The Butterfly Effect and wrote 11.22.63 as his interpretation of the phenomenon. 

Now back to my story.

At the beginning of the movie, a character, who had traveled back to 1960, says to the main character of the story that the food back then tasted better than it does today.  Keith turned to me and said, "See?  I told you the food was better back when I was a kid."

The food did taste better when we were kids, didn't it?  The thought may have triggered an emotion in you that no English word describes.  It's a nostalgic, almost melancholic desire to return to days that have long since passed.   We hear the emotion expressed every day.

"Back when I was a kid...."

"In the good ol' days...."

"Whatever happened to...."

"I remember when...."

Yet there is no English word to describe the emotion being expressed.

Ok, don't pretend you have no idea what I'm talking about.  "Back when I was a kid...I used to love caramel apples."  That's not the feeling I'm describing. 

"Back when I was a kid...caramel on caramel apples was richer and creamier.  Those were the good days when the food tasted better" - now that's getting closer to the feeling I'm describing.  There's a certain longing or desire for food to taste like it once did.  For soda to taste sweet like it did when they used real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.  Or candy bars to be loaded with whole peanuts instead of lightly coated with peanut pieces.  Or chips to be liberally doused with their flavorings instead of sprinkled with just enough to be able to call them something more than just chips. Or...well, you get the picture, but if not, Mark Schatzker delights us with an entertaining read of why everything tastes like chicken today.

A few of my articles touch on this emotion that no English word describes.  The historic tours of Maryland's Eastern Shore's watermen communities or one man's fight to save an island are a couple of examples.

An entire industry was built on this emotion.  From blues to rock and bluegrass to hip hop, songs lament for the days when life was simpler and love was virgin.  Songs as disparate as longing for a lost love or searching for greener grass where the corn don't grow, the lyrics express a longing for what was, but we know we can never have again.

Most anything can trigger the emotion.  The trigger can be an article, a song, a scene in a park, the sight of an old house abandoned and crumbling, the smile of your spouse years after you first met, and, yes, even the taste of your favorite dish.  Sometimes, it can be more than one trigger over a period of days...or even longer...that elicits the emotion of aching longing you finally feel.

Coming across the Choptank River Bridge in Cambridge shortly after sunset, a waterman chugged his boat into port, the red and green bow lights leading the way.  I could hear the quiet, hollow splashing of the bow waves as the work boat cut its path towards the dock.  No, my hearing isn't that good.  I experienced a touch of this emotion no English word describes.  I have been on a boat enough to know what it sounds like as it chugs into port.  As the waterman chugged his way in, the sight triggered the sounds in my head, the sense of independence of doing a hard day's work, and the longing to be free and independent like that waterman.

A week and a half later, I passed through some watermen towns on a road trip that I haven't been through since I was a kid.  Many of the buildings once lived in lay empty and deteriorating, skeletal reminders of glory days gone by.  My thoughts flashed back to the waterman's boat chugging into port as I crossed the Choptank Bridge.  With the backdrop of these dying watermen communities, the slow chug and quiet, hollow splashing of the bow waves echoed the dejected emotion of another hard day's work that yielded a poverty level catch - a catch caught under the burden of excessive regulation designed to put the independent waterman out of business.  As much as we cherish our waterman past, the waterman is a dying breed - one our grandchildren might only get to read about in books.

My road trip that day took me practically the entire length of Delmarva.  With the exception of Betterton Beach - an excursion into this emotion of melancholic longing in itself - my travels were off the beaten path and even further from the tourist's path.  It's off the freeways and beyond the two-lane roads with their neatly painted center lines that one discovers the glorious past of what once was and has since been lost.  It's off these beaten paths that you discover the lost hopes, shattered dreams, and the collective death of a way of life - the death of a culture.

Heading north on US 301 on my trip to Betterton Beach, I passed Joe's gas station.  Anyone who passes Joe's would see an abandoned gas station and next to it, another abandoned building that could've been a retail outlet or restaurant.  Some might not give the sight a second thought.  Others might be hit with a twinge of the emotion that has no English word equivalent.

Why were these buildings abandoned?

Who owned these businesses and what happened to them?

Why did they close?

Where did the people go?

Were times here better long ago?

Who lived and worked here and what stories will they not get to tell?

                What faded dreams look like                 

 That fleeting glimpse of two abandoned buildings takes  
 you back to where you lived and grew up...back to the  
 time when the food tasted better and life was simpler. 
 You have no connection to the abandoned buildings nor  
 to the area you're passing through, but somehow you  
 feel a little empty.
 

As I passed Joe's, I felt that emptiness and longing to go back to when the area was vibrant and alive.  The difference for me, however, is I didn't need to guess the story behind the abandoned gas station.  Since I grew up in the area, I sort of knew the story.

Joe, the garage mechanic and owner of the now abandoned shop, wore light colored overalls and a light gray baseball cap that hugged his skull.  Oddly, I remember his nose being almost Bob Hope like, but not as pronounced in its upturn, and more flattened on its tip with a bit of a crease down the middle.  A couple of deep wrinkles on his face told me he was old, but to a ten-year-old, anyone out of high school was old.  I simply knew he was as old as my Mom and Dad, if not older.

The only other thing I remember is a huge pot sat on the floor by the window and a huge jade tree flourished in what looked like no soil.  When I asked Mr. Joe how he got the tree so big, all he said was that he dumped cigarette ashes and coffee grounds in the pot every morning along with the dirt he swept up every evening.  He watered it whenever he remembered, which, he said, might have been two or three times a month.

My Dad wasn't fond of Joe and only used his services a couple of times in an emergency.  As a kid, I didn't know the reasons why nor did I care about the games adults play.  I do remember my Dad talking in conversation at home that Joe held onto that gas station because some day it would make him rich.

"Plans are," my Dad claimed, "to reroute all the 95 traffic cutting through DC and Baltimore going to Philly and points north over the Bridge to alleviate the DC/Baltimore congestion.  The new route will bring tens of thousands of truckers and travelers right past Joe's.  Joe figures he's sitting on a valuable piece of real estate when all that traffic comes."

Those may have been the plans over forty years ago, but the traffic never came.  Joe's gas station and the Howard Johnson's next door are boarded up, vacant buildings today.  The buildings stand as testament to the lives that were and the hopes and dreams that faded away.

All along my trip, abandoned or crumbling buildings dotted my journey.  I didn't know the story behind those buildings like I knew the story behind Joe's gas station, but that feeling of aching, almost melancholic longing, created their stories for me.

Passing through the town of Crumpton, MD, the deteriorating houses peppering Main Street triggered that feeling no English word describes.  Passing a dilapidated house, I saw ten-year-old Billy and Eric on the wrap around porch eating watermelon and spitting the seeds out across the sidewalk in a competition of who could spit the seeds the furthest.  Eric's sixteen-year-old sister, Melissa, storms out on the porch shooing her brother and his friend away.

"Go on, Eric.  Take Billy with you and go eat your watermelon across the yard.  Tommy's coming by and I don't want you embarrassing me in front of him."

Eric teases his sister a little more and then motions for Billy to follow him to the river bank where they eat more watermelon while doing a little bit of fishing.

The scene takes place some seventy or eighty years ago, back in the dilapidated house's heyday.  Little brother Eric, like everyone in town, knew when Melissa would graduate high school in two years, she and Tommy would get married and start a family of their own.  Tommy would work the water like his father and his grandfather did, and like all the men in his family did as far back as anyone could remember.  Melissa would tend to the house, raise the children, and she and the children would farm their acre or two, the farm that would provide all their vegetables through the winter with maybe some extra pickled and stewed vegetables to sell to Mr. Grimble, owner of the general store down the street.  She would even grow watermelon so her son and his friend could spit watermelon seeds from their porch.

Within a year after chasing her brother and his friend from the porch, though, tragedy struck Melissa's family.  Mom got real sick.  The community came together to try to help the family.  Melissa's high school held a series of bake sales to raise money to help cover her family's medical expenses, including the frequent trips to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore across the Bay.  The congregation at the Church prayed every Sunday and held a few bazaars and charity bingo nights to help Melissa's family meet their financial costs.

In the end, though, Melissa's Dad had to sell his boat and then the house with the wrap around porch that Eric and his friend, Billy, spat watermelon seeds from.  Halfway through Melissa's senior year of high school, Dad had sold everything Melissa had ever known as her life so they could move across the Bay to a smaller, city dwelling.  Mom had to get better and the only way she could get better was to be nearer to the hospital trying to treat her illness.

Before leaving, Melissa promised Tommy once she graduated high school over there, she'd come back to him.  Tommy promised he would work hard and have a house waiting for her when she returned.

Tommy graduated high school, but Melissa never returned.  He wrote her and she him, but the letters came fewer and fewer apart as the months passed.  The last Tommy heard from Melissa was a year and a half or so after he graduated high school.  Because of the move halfway through her senior year, the city schools held her back a year.

Tommy knew Melissa would return to him.  He worked the Bay hard and saved every penny he could.  He wanted to buy her old house if the current owners ever sold it.  That would be his gift to her, the house she grew up in, when she came back.

One day, about three years after he graduated high school, Tommy took the boat out to dredge some oysters.  All the old timers warned him to stay in port because a big storm was brewing, but he brushed off the warnings.

"Pop can't get out like he used to and we still have bills to pay.  I can get at least a half day of dredging done."

Tommy never returned to port that day.  After the storm had passed, his boat was found adrift, but half full of water, about thirty miles down the Bay.  Three days after the storm, Tommy's body was found washed up in a cove.

Rumors were Tommy was so heart broken, he committed suicide that day out on his boat.  Others said the storm grew more quickly and more fierce than anyone could predict and Tommy was caught off guard by it.  Others said he was just too cocky of a young man who tried to defy the conventional wisdom of the old timers and paid the ultimate price for his youthful arrogance.  Whatever happened on the boat that day, no one will ever know, but they'll all talk about it as if they were there.

Tommy's parents buried him up on the hill.  His Pop didn't have the energy to go out on the water any more after Tommy died.  They sold their house and disappeared from the community.  Rumors abounded, none worth repeating.

Many years later, when Billy was well passed middle age, he claimed he saw a guy about his age with an older woman wandering around the tombstones up on the hill.  They stopped at Tommy's grave.  The woman stooped down and gently touched the cold concrete tombstone and then the two wandered off.  Billy swears the guy was his childhood friend, Eric, and his sister, Melissa, but by the time he stumbled up the hill, the car they were in had already driven halfway down the road out of town.

That makes for a nice story, but no one in town believed Billy.  He grew up to be the town drunk, and probably stoner, so some say.  Since no one else saw the strangers up on the hill, townsfolk entertained Billy's story, but none really believed him.

You almost want a rewind to when Billy and
Eric spat watermelon seeds from the porch

No one in Crumpton today, who sees Melissa's old, falling down home, knows anything about the house or who lived in it.  The people who would know have long since died.  Their children, who might remember something, sit in a nursing home today reminiscing about their own lives, and probably reminiscing in some other state far from Crumpton.  They might be able to vaguely recall the story and their tragic ending, but, honestly, Melissa's house outlived everyone's memory of Tommy and Melissa.

People are very adaptable to change.  They come and go in their pursuit of stability for their families and for greener pastures.  The footprints they leave behind - abandoned businesses, overgrown gardens, vacant homes, and, yes, tombstones - are stories of hopes and dreams manifested, but never told...lived, but long forgotten. 

Perhaps I inadvertently explained why we experience this almost melancholic, yet hopeful yearning emotion that no English word describes.  We fear facing and accepting the fact our existence here is temporary...an insignificant pixel in the bigger picture of existence.  We want to go back to the time when life's experiences we're new and we believed we had forever to learn and enjoy all life gave us.

We don't have a word to describe this emotion, but the Portuguese do.  They call it saudade (pronunciation).  Maybe we should face our mortality and adopt the Portuguese word for the emotion that took me over two thousand words to convey.

And maybe we should start living every day as if it's our last because you'll never be able to recapture it later when you miss it the most.



TL;DR folks:
There's an emotion we all experience, but no English word describes.  It took me over 2,000 words to try to describe it.  Sit back with a beer or glass of wine and savor the reading.  Some day, you might miss the good old days when you weren't so hurried to do things.

For your listening pleasure

Since I could not find an appropriate video to go with my song selection, Love and Rocket's Saudade, I had to make my own video.  That meant scouring hours and hours worth of video to find the perfect clip for the story I had in mind to tell you.  After listening to the music selection, please click on the links to YouTube videos I used to tell my story.  These professional storytellers tell a story much better than I can in a song clip.

• Eastern Exposure: A Chesapeake Story Documentary on Crisfield, Maryland
• 1952 Day In The Life Of A 1950s Small Town Part I
• 1952 Day In The Life Of A 1950s Small Town Part II
• WBOC Travels With Charlie- Blueberries, Peaches, Apples and Corn with Charlie Paparella
• Watermen of the Bay crabbing on the little Choptank 6 AM

Posted by Five Drunk Rednecks