“I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (233).
If I could slip into the folds of time and tell myself a story about myself, a story that could convince me to believe, a story that needed to be heard, it would be a story about the good ol’ days when I was a child free of the responsibilities that come with age. In fact, it wouldn’t even have to be a complete story told to meet Sanders’ standards or one. It would just be a vignette-ish mass of words that could make me feel warm and sentimental and temporarily bring the dead to life.
It would sound along the lines of this:
My mother first met Grandpa Milton when she wore her hair in oversized, overpermed fluffs and curls. He made sure that her papers were free of awkward English, and that, she claimed, was how she passed her classes with high praise. In a picture of them together, taken right after her college graduation, they’re under the shade of a flowering tree, he’s wearing a pair of aviators and she’s still in her cap and gown. He’s beaming with pride and they look just like father and daughter, save for the differences that were only skin deep.
She called him Poppy, like the seeds on bagels, but that wasn’t why she called him that. It was Poppy, like an affectionate British slang for “Pops.” And with no daughter of his own, there was nobody else to call him Poppy or Dad or Father.
“When you were born, he was there right away ready to hold you. Then, for you birthday, the fourth one…or maybe it was the fifth…you said you wanted to wear the blue dress, the one with the pink ribbon because you knew he was coming to visit your class. You were so excited and told all of your friends that your grandfather was coming. Don’t you remember?”
I don’t, but there’s a picture with creased corners dated '97 tucked away safely in a photo album that proves my mother right (like usual).
Grandpa Milton was family. He gave me lucky money in used red envelopes that were so old that they were creased and crusty at the seal. He bought countless cups of mango pudding even after my mother screeched, “Don’t buy it! Sabrina already ate this and that. Poppy, don’t! You can’t have it either. Remember your diabetes!”
He simply laughed his mellow old man laugh.
My mother regularly took me to visit his studio by the East River. Time seemed stationary in Grandpa Milton’s studio, and because he didn’t have air conditioning; so on humid summer days, time lagged even more slowly.
I sat on the ledge by his window and stretch as far out as I could without falling down eleven floors to my death. Using his rusted binoculars, I scanned the city scene below me and through a film of grease on the lens, I saw boats bobbing left and right, right and left, cruising down the river. I wasted many afternoons watching white sails; they taught me that nothing was constant, but anything could be beautiful.
Memories and responsibilities are heavy, and if we reflect too much upon the past, on regrets, on trying to reconstruct emotions, on what we ought to do, on who we ought to be, then life, in itself, is an awfully heavy burden. Yet, as heavy as memories and responsibilities are, what we choose to remember and what we choose to do create who we are as individuals. The irony, though, is that sometimes when life becomes dreary, we need rekindle a warm memory to lighten our stresses and worries, our fears and inconsistencies.
My warmest memories are of people who I can no longer make memories with. And when their sounds and smells become increasingly harder to recall, I write down my memories to capture grains of truthfully felt emotions with even the slightest of details. I find that words are harder to muster when the memory, the inspiration, is fading. The words become heavy. The letters become heavy. But if I were to be left with nothing—no memories and no accounts of memories—the emptiness would be the greatest weight of all.
Note: According to my mother, there isn't a photo of her and Grandpa Milton under a tree taken after her college graduation. In fact, according to her, he wasn't even at her college graduation. So, where did my memory of the photo come from? I can't remember what floor his flat was on, either. In many ways, some aspects of my story was created, but the feeling that it evokes, for me, is that of the memory I want to save.
ReplyDeleteIn that sense, this too is a work of "fiction," a "half-story" much like the ones of war O'Brien (author and character) writes.
To comment on your comment, I too have memories that are (according to my mother completely invented). I remember times when I have told my mom something I remember from my childhood and she tells me that what I am describing never happened. Yet I continue to swear that it did. In my mind these memories from my childhood are true, they seem really real. But they probably didn’t ever truly happen. But I don’t think that matters, if we believe something happened than to us it did. I also have often had arguments with my sister about an event that she swears happened the way she remembers it, but I know for a fact that it happened in an entirely different way. However, it is pointless trying to convince her otherwise because she fully believes that her memory of the event is a hundred percent true.
ReplyDelete(by the way I enjoyed reading your post) :)