The Last Wooden Stand

Modern media is polluting my episodic memories.

I grew up in Indianapolis. I spent my May weekends with my dad at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway every year starting in 1959. On my first visit to the track, I saw the straightaway still paved with bricks, the noisy Offenhauser roadsters, roaring by at about a blazing 135 mph (~90 mph slower than today’s IndyCars), and the last of the original wooden grandstands from 1911.

I can barely picture those old wooden stands in my mind now. I recall that we were not allowed to sit in them during practice and qualification (maybe not even Raceday) due to their condition and the risk of fire. And yet, I was told they were the last of the stands built before the inaugural 1911 Indianapolis 500 Mile Race.

The problem is that I have seen the new replacement stands so many times, both in person and now in the media, that the old visual memory is all but gone. In fact, I’m not sure what I’m recalling in my mind’s eye because my head is clouded with photos I’ve seen (old and new) that are now the building materials of my new mental image. I don’t even have a postcard image of the new stands because I once marched in my high school band past them in 1968, and that fuzzy imagery is dominant. Fans arriving at the front straightaway grandstands, me in my uniform, sweltering, marching, playing my clarinet no one can hear, wearing an all-season band uniform with an overlay and fuzzy hat on an 80-degree morning…on a day I woke up with a fever. We’re now on the backstretch. I’m delirious, seeing a mirage.

Right now, I’m trying to picture the old wooden grandstands nearer the north end of the straightaway, but I keep seeing the new metal stands instead, along with the band. If I work hard at it, I can almost replace that image of them with that of the old…but not quite, because my head must first perform “object removal” of the band. This is photo editing without a “Revert to Original” option.

You know how if you make a photocopy of an image, then a copy of that copy, and repeat this process over and over, you end up with a poor replica of the original? Generational loss. That’s what it’s like, except with each photocopy, my unsuccessful attempt to restore what got degraded, by adding back some color by hand before re-copying it, results in something unlike either the original or the present-day image. It’s its own image. That is what I see now. It’s a pentimento — the trace of what was there before, faintly visible beneath what came after, never fully covered.

I began by blaming modern media for this by flooding my head with so much new imagery of a place I once knew well. But I’m seeing that the blame is misdirected. If I had never visited the Speedway after May 1959, I would essentially be redrawing that image with each recollection anyway. Even if I were to review old family photos from that time — in a kind of mental image touchup — my mind would likely wander to yet other aspects of the scene we didn’t photograph and add to the new composite. Soon, they all begin to blend into an episodic memory whose edges have all been fuzzed.

I’m the polluter of my own memories, and I can’t fix them. With each passing second, I’m laying down new memories no more permanent than those wooden grandstands. And yet, somehow I still see that old roadster barreling past them over the brick that’s no longer there, with me standing there playing my clarinet. Undo, undo, undo.