Now Playing: Remembering to Remember
I've always promised myself that I would never do this, talk about it, be a part of it.... But the truth is that from the time we were born the clock starts to tick and tock forward and we start getting older.
When I was three years old I began to 'remember'. That is, it was a forward event that happened that caused me to remember from that point and onward. Memory happens to most of us if all the brain parts are wired correctly. In my case, it was a concerted effort that I decided on a very special day.
I was in the backyard with my Dad. I remember that he was working in his small garden and clearing stuff in the yard. I wandered and puttered about with him because he was the GOD and my mother the GODDESS and above all other parents I understood other children defintely had, MY parents were the only true, correct, perfect, and most beautiful that had ever been created. My Dad knew everything. Everything he said and did was gospel and perfect.
He was wearing a pair of work pants and because his was hot work on a very hot day, he'd taken his shirt off while sweat poured down his face and his chest, and back and arms were coppered by summer. He had finished his work with a beautiful tooth-smile and had just wiped his forearm across his forehead and stood strong and straight with a grand 'Whew!' surveying the now pedicured loveliness of the backyard such as it was. I stood beside him and stared up into his face waiting for what the next 'event' was going to be.
'So, what do you think Becky?' I remember him asking me letting the sweat-wiping arm relax while the other still held a shovel or rake at the other side. I looked around but wasn't really sure what I was supposed to supply by worthy comment. But it was at that moment, that single ticks and tocks of early time, that I swept my eyes across the back of the house and that's when I saw it, the thing that would forever be my trigger to 'remember'. It was a patch of pink, a pink thing caught up under the space below the back porch where a multitude of other 'stuff' had been staked and stored like a giant puzzle with no space left for another piece to be fit. That'pink' thing caught and held my eye.
'What is that Daddy?' I had asked and he bent a little and tried to follow my eyes easily three feet below his own and then 'What Honey, what is it you see?'
'Over there, over there a pink thing.'
'Oh my goodness, don't you remember your rocking horse? That was yours and you used to sit on it all the time'
I dug deep into my mind, my still growing brain. I dug and dug and dug but no matter how deeply I went I could not conjure back the image of a rocking horse, a pink rocking horse, nor a time when I might have sat upon such a perfectly lovely color. 'No', I finally admitted, 'I don't remember', and I was so sad that I didn't. 'Can I have it back?'
'Honey you're too big for it now and it's been under there for a very long time. It's all dirty now and broken.'
I continued to stare and almost wept inside. If ONLY I could remember. If only I could pull the image back out again and see myself sitting on the pink rocking horse and remember how it felt. But I couldn't. In fact, I realized during those horrifying moments that I couldn't remember even the day before, or the one before that. I suddenly had the epifany of my little life....'remembering' was very important. Remembering would let me be more than I was. I decided at that moment, on that very day, standing beside my Dad, that treasures like 'remembering riding the pink rocking horse' could always be there IF I made sure to remember. Remember, that was the key I thought to myself....I MUST remember to remember!
That was the day that my life really began. There had, I knew, been days before that one, lots of days before, but I couldn't recall anything of those times, the times before that day. But I remembered the days after, and all the years after too. Some things were set aside as insignificant, unimportant, painful or totally unworthy of being filed and those sit in far corners even to this day....but the day I remembered to remember....that's a day I think of pink.
But there's also been recently, now anyway, another pivitol epifany....for as painful as it had been as yet a toddler to realize that a bit of my life had been lived but totally lost in a kind of void that I nearly cried over, I've also begun to understand a bit more about that seeming void and what it may also mean at the close of life....
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There were points in my growing childhood when I would 'remember' that day, the beginning of a kind of understanding and while I played I started to 'mark' moments very deliberately so I could remember not just a particular moment of seemingly insignificance, but also remember how the air felt against my skin at that moment, how it smelled, how the sun shown down and made shadows, who was around me and what I was hearing. Sometimes I would look at a warped leaf so closely that it was burned into my memory. Each time I told myself VERY loudly: 'remember this, feel it so you can live it again'. Many years later I could pull those very stark and clear memories up again....at least as clear as is possible given that my file system is after all, comprised of flesh and tiny electrical impulses generated by that flesh.
In time, many years later, I can even feel how much closer to the ground I was then, can see my feet trodding home along a child-paved path across a field, a short cut, and I can remember what I thought when I looked at my feet and how that distance from eyes to feet would one day widen as I grew....and I can remember wondering what we might have for supper that night and remember how good it felt to be out of school for the day and how yellow the sun beams seemed to be in the afternoon and how my puffy jacket was beginning to press against my waist because it was becoming smaller or I was building bigger.....
I could do all that remembering and cataloging and even pulling those landscapes back out to the front of my mind....but what I could not do, and what I labored over was where I was when all those famous things in history happened. Where had I been before my parents ever met? Where had I been when they had been children even younger than I was at that moment?
Where had I been? Where?
And later on, much later on, many years later on, I still wondered, but I also wondered, 'where would I be once my flesh stopped? Where will I go when the plug is pulled? Will I know when I leave?'
I knew I wasn't the only one, the only person to ask that question. Sometimes it's asked aloud and sometimes it's even answered by various religions or cultural beliefs. These are manufactured ideas though, because we're all afraid, instively we're afraid...because that's the way we're designed. We understand things or ideas that begin and end, in linear line, yet we cannot imagine being included in an idea that has edges or borders. The truth is that no one knows and at first that frightened me too until I stopped and looked at what I DO know:
I know that I don't remember anything prior to my own birth (noreven time before I was 3 years old). But not knowing didn't hurt, that period of time was not painful nor fearful and when I ponder it all from the beginning of the BANG that started everything, I had no pain, no fear..... So, I suspect from what I DO know, than when this blip of 'remembering' stops, I will probably again feel no fear, nor pain again.
I don't know if I find comfort in that or not. I do remember than when I first discovered how babies were made I was both amazed and shocked.....it was not at all the thing even my own very vivid child mind could have conjured. So, perhaps I will be amazed yet again.....?
REMBERING AGES---
I remember how the world seemed to me when I remembered to rememer. Everything was sharp-edeged and almost too bright. Sounds and movement were sometimes too loud or chaotic, difficult to access because there was too much. It was like gorging on food...having too much in my mouth to properly chew and then too much to swallow. I didn't want to miss any of it though because it might not come again.
I remember sitting on the porch swing with my Mom during a thunderstorm. She tented an old wool army blanket over us so we could see but still stay warm and cozy while the thunder roared and rolled and stabbed my ears and lightening slashed and cracked. Then the rain fell and the air turned silky damp. "Look Becky; see how pretty each drop splashes on the sidewalk and street?" My Mom loved to watch these surfaces mirror in the rain and because she did, I carried the same delight with me as I moved through the ages of my own life as well.
'Don't be afraid of the thunder. We're safe and snug right here under our blanket on the swing," she told me as she brought the blanket up a little and wrapped one side more snuggly around me and pulled me close.
"I'm not afraid' I told her, and I remember giggling and thinking we were really under a magic blanket, just my Mom and me. The thunder could not hear us nor could the lightening see us...but we could see the anger of both in the cold-pelting rain. Silver splashes on silver steps and walks and streets surrounded by silver sky and thick packed pewter clouds. All of it a show and orchestra accompanyment Oh yes, that was magic and that moment, that little stretch of time got tucked away into the treasure box of my memory.
Posted by hulitoons
at 11:09 AM EDT
Updated: Monday, 14 July 2008 9:26 PM EDT
