Memory
Image by Dylan Shoemaker
Memory
“We don’t remember days; we remember moments.” – Cesare Pavese
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The prompt was to write about what happened when you heard of the sudden passing of someone from your past. I had just read about the death of a woman whose children I had babysat for when I was 14. The bell-ringing memories, my 14-year-old feelings, and my recent experience of reconnecting to this woman filled my thoughts for days after.
I had been wanting to visit Madelaine & Brint but had been putting it off. When I walked into their family room last year, the memory of falling asleep on their couch, smelling gas from their stove, and being impressed by Madelaine’s’ efficient preparation for her boys’ supper came back like a wave, a murmuration. Madelaine was clipped and serious; Brint, slouched on the sofa, smiled through his confusion, trying to place me in his past.
Everything was in its place, so perfectly organized, that I felt at home in the chair across the beige carpet from the two of them. The same chair from 60 years ago, recovered, and cushion-y. We talked about the intervening years, looking around the corner to plan a future get-together, and toasted a renewed relationship, different though. When I read that Madelaine had passed, I thought, “There goes a formative piece of my childhood,” even though grown-up me had a new perspective on that old relationship. I remembered that recent visit, but more, I conjured scenes from my babysitting days: Playing with her three rambunctious boys, corralling them to the dining table for a meal, reading to them before bed. And then, that evening when I fell asleep, startled awake when I heard the door open, I tried to look as though I wasn’t groggy & disoriented with sleep. I was mortified. Young girl trying to be a woman. “Not yet girl.” In a couple more years I had a boy of my own, and it wouldn’t matter where I fell asleep. Life trails onward, sometimes we hang on to the tail of a kite, and sometimes we follow the scent of the future in an attempt to become what we think we are supposed to be.
Remembering lives in my eyes as I stand by her headstone in the town cemetery. It lives in my feet as I walk the length of the aisle during her funeral. And it lives in my ears as I hear three boys’ voices, so resonant of the past, but grown up and calling for their mother through their tone of remembrance.
Memory is a thing with wings….it carries us away or it tucks us into a hidey-hole to emerge later when there’s time to listen to its rhythm. The rhythm of living and dying.