I've seen him before--often. In my father's collection of slides is a photograph of me at age 3 encountering Emmett Kelly Jr. at the World's Fair. I'm wearing a cute little summer dress and holding the skirt out to the sides as I curtsy to the clown.
I have no memory of this, of course, but I have internalized my parents' memories of the event until they are nearly my own. I was there! (Although not, apparently, while he was making that charming hand gesture.)
"I was there!" I told my American Lit Survey students this morning as we encountered the World's Fair in an entirely different context: Kurt Vonnegut's introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five. He describes taking two sweet little girls in party dresses to the 1964 World's Fair, where he "saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
Time and memory slip away and even pictures resist comprehension. Today I look beyond the famous clown and wonder about the little hand reaching into the frame from the right, eager to touch the hem of his garment. Is that moment preserved forever in some family's photo album? Does the hand remember or is it dependent, like me, on prosthetic memory?
That past, so distant in my students' minds, was once my present--but how much of that present was mine to keep?
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