Track 29: The Magnetic Draw by Kimberly Nelson
A few weeks after my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, she pulled every family album off the bookcase and removed all of the pictures. One day I walked into the living room of the house I grew up in and found her nestled into the couch, surrounded by dozens of plastic bins filled with photos. She looked so small, dressed in a light pink sweatsuit, pillows tucked around her, empty photo albums cast to the side once their innards had been surgically removed.
“The adhesive is ruining the pictures,” she explained, showing me the residual glue clinging to the back of a photo from the eighties.
My mom has always been excellent at documenting our family. At my childhood birthday parties, she trailed me with a bulky camcorder perched on her petite shoulder. When we watched the videos, the camera always focused on us kids, capturing our teetering steps, our first time on a bicycle, our high-pictured laughter. “Mom, look at me! Look at me!” Her voice, from behind the camera, always offscreen, “I see you, Kimi!”
The amount of photos was overwhelming, sixty-ish years of our family’s history overflowing in stacked bins, covering the coffee table and swaths of carpet. I picked up a box at random and leafed through. There were photos of my dad’s two brothers, bright-eyed, laughing, their expressions so similar to my siblings’. Both passed away before the age of fifty. My mom and her sisters, all lined up on the living room couch in seventies attire, the youngest still in coke bottle glasses. Me as a baby on my grandma's lap, and I could practically hear her voice singing to me again “I have two hands, the left and the right.” I hopscotched across decades from one era to another, shag haircuts to cardigan twinsets to my grandpa’s button-down barong when he still lived in the Philippines.
“What are you going to do with them next?” I asked my mom.
“I’ll digitize them so they stay preserved.”
The cancer diagnosis had activated my Eldest Daughter mode; I began to drive to my parents’ house in the suburbs a few days a week to accompany her to the hospital and be the official family representative during that day’s scans or blood draw. It was overwhelming, spending this much time back in my parents’ house while life changed overnight. Pill bottles accumulated on the coffee table where I used to stack my Babysitters Club books; a walker appeared next to the front door when my mom’s balance was thrown off by the tumor pushing on her brain. I drove around town running errands while listening to the radio, picking up prescriptions and groceries, taking unnecessary drive-bys past the scenes of my youth. Some places still looked exactly the same; others, like my best friend’s house, had been demolished and rebuilt, McMansions eating up every inch of yard until they were practically making out with the property next door.
On a sunny April afternoon, I turned the key in my car; the radio kicked on and filled the interior of the Subaru with “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones. “Well we all need someone we can lean on, and if you want it, you can lean on me.” My entire body unclenched. I sat alone in the driver's seat, just me with Mick Jagger, my chest warming up, eyes filling with tears.
My parents had taken me to a Rolling Stones concert at Soldier Field when I was in college. Our seats were in the upper bowl, the cool wind blowing in off the lake, the Chicago skyline visible in the distance. I remember seeing my parents having such a great time dancing and singing along with the Stones, a glimpse into the people they were before they were my parents, back when they were young and could party all night. The same young faces in those photos filled bins stacked all over my parents’ living room, while my mom sat on the couch, staring down cancer.
“If you want it, you can lean on me…”
The first time I saw the stacked bins of family photos, I had a flashback to thirteen years earlier, the coldest night of January 2008 in Chicago. It was 2am and I woke up to the sound of my roommate frantically pounding on my bedroom door. I groped for my glasses on the nightstand, then saw water rushing in as high as the box spring of my bed. Our garden level apartment was being flooded. Random shoes, my desk chair, and my storage trunk bobbed in murky water like buoys at sea. That trunk held all of my old photos from high school and college, still tucked inside their paper envelopes from the Walgreens one-hour photo department. It also held multiple shoeboxes containing my collection of mixtapes. My whole pre-smartphone life in physical media was now submerged in filthy floodwater.
“Holy shit!” I shouted. Two of my four roommates also had bedrooms on the garden level of our duplex apartment. I could hear Matt bang on Thomas’s room next; our hallway sounded like a babbling brook as water gushed in under the laundry room door. In the window well, my cat yowled in a panic with nowhere to jump down to safety.
“We have to get out before it’s at outlet level!” my roommate shouted.
I lowered my bare feet into the icy water and the cold sucked all of the life out of me. I sloshed my way through the calf-deep water, pushed my floating trunk to the wall beneath the window well, then stepped on top of it to reach my cat. She clawed frantically at my arms as I carried her to the stairwell, where she launched herself out of my arms at the first sight of dry land.
Upstairs, our two other roommates had woken up and were staring out the window. Water coursed through the street, gushing around cars and trees. North Wolcott Ave had turned into a river. Its frothy surface reflected the soft orange glow of the streetlights, like a dream or a Roland Emmerich-helmed disaster movie.
My feet screamed in pain, burning pins and needles. I turned on the upstairs bathtub and filled it with warm water, then dipped in my toes, slowly reviving them. I borrowed dry pajamas from my upstairs roommate Tina, and camped out on the living room couch, exhausted and so, so cold.
Dawn arrived with answers. A water main under Montrose Ave had frozen and burst, creating a massive eighty-feet wide sinkhole. The water had drained overnight, leaving a sludge of dirt and debris strewn everywhere, tidepools of litter and cigarette butts.
My roommates and I surveyed the wreckage. I stared down into the stack of disintegrated Adidas shoeboxes that had housed my mixtape collection. The playlists so painstakingly inked in my high school handwriting were no longer readable. I used to love illustrating the blank white covers; those hand-drawn covers were now a smear of gel pen.
It’s a wild thing to go to bed with your life as you know it assembled around you and wake up to see it all wash away in minutes.
On an early April evening in 2021, my mom texted me on the way to the emergency room. She was experiencing double vision and splitting headaches, and her gut told her something was wrong. The hospital admitted her for tests, then kept her overnight. An update the next day upended my family’s lives; my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to her brain and her spine. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it—my mom was a lifelong nonsmoker. Nothing felt real.
I spent several days with my mom in the hospital through tests and biopsies, a KN95 strapped tight on my face, the nurses kindly looking the other way when covid-shortened visiting hours ended. Life became a marathon of making phone calls to family, emailing work that I’d be gone, running to the grocery store or the pharmacy. At night, I couldn’t turn off my brain, and I woke up to panic attacks, my body trembling in fight or flight mode.
I would do anything to take this away from my mom, my beautiful, quietly rebellious mother, who taught me to embrace what I love in life. She moved to Chicago from the Philippines when she was twelve years old and assimilated by becoming a Beatles fanatic. She sewed a secret pocket into her Catholic school uniform so she could listen to her transistor radio during class. My friends became accustomed to me running into my mom when we were out at shows at rock clubs like the Metro or the Riv. She usually had a much better spot than my friends and me, using her petite size to sneak her way to the front row, the crowd making room for her because they figured she must be somebody’s mother.
On a winter weekend, some years after my apartment flooded and years before my mom got cancer, I sat with a friend over a cluttered tabletop full of beer cans and bourbon glasses, talking about mixtapes. He had recently listened to an NPR podcast about the deterioration of physical music media.
“They lose their magnetic draw,” he explained of old cassette tapes. “Over years, the magnetic coating of the film within tapes erodes away, until the tape is blank again.”
I soaked in that statement along with an evening’s worth of IPAs. “That’s heavy.” I’d never gotten over the loss of my mixtape collection. I remembered making many of those tapes, afternoons after school spent meticulously adding up the run time of each song so that the last track wouldn’t get cut off mid-tune. I put thought into the order, considering the way each song would complement the next. I hadn’t even owned a tape deck in years, but I felt comforted knowing those tapes were close by, time capsules from my formative years, memories to slide back into like a favorite sweatshirt. A few staticky opening notes transported me to high school, riding shotgun in my best friend’s red Geo Metro while blaring Alanis Morissette. The building guitar chords of The Cure’s “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” whisked me back to my college dorm freshman year. Any Beatles song reminded me of being in my parents’ house, curled up on the living room couch with a book while my mom brewed coffee. And the Rolling Stones brought me back to that concert at Soldier Field, singing along to “Let It Bleed” as the stadium illuminated with thousands of Bic lighters.
As my memories associated with those curated playlists would fade, so would the tapes themselves. We hold onto our things for so long to cling to those memories a little bit longer, to fight against the unavoidable march of time that takes everything away from us.
My sister Lauren and I started going to our parents’ house together for a special project; we were recording our mom’s oral history. Lauren made a Google doc list of interview questions beginning with her earliest memories and childhood, then asking about her experience of moving from the Philippines to the United States, her teenage years and early adulthood, meeting our dad, having four kids and parenting two stepchildren, all leading up to this current moment. We used my phone to record the videos, then I backed them up immediately, because I knew all too well how easy it is to lose things. We interviewed her over four afternoons, asking her everything we’ve ever wanted to know. I asked her about the bands she saw in the sixties (the Beatles at Comiskey Field, The Who in a small club in the suburbs before they became giant rock stars). I asked what I was like as a little kid (quiet, serious, conscientious, shy). I asked her to tell us what she remembered of her childhood in the Philippines (the constant noise of birds, the intense humidity of summer, picnicking in the mountains and eating off of banana leaves). We soaked in every word, pressing for details, double-checking my phone to make sure it was still recording. After each interview session, I downloaded it to my laptop and backed it up. Then I checked and double-checked to make sure it was still there in my drive, not one image or sound byte lost to the void.
I keep making time capsules, whether they live in Dropbox or in Adidas shoeboxes. But the ones that really get you are the moments that creep up on you, a random song coming onto the radio when you’re sitting alone in your car, and Mick Jagger suddenly fills your ear, whisking you back to a perfect night in a stadium reverberating with guitar riffs, back when you were impossibly young and didn’t yet know what it means to lose something.
Kimberly Nelson is a writer, outdoor cat, and karaoke enthusiast from Chicago. She is currently working on an essay collection about growing up as a mixed race/second generation Filipino American and pop culture obsessive in the Midwest. www.kimberlymilanelson.com
