Memory One

One of the most moving accounts of the past and memories is Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet. Succumbing to Lou Gherig’s disease, he gradually could live only within himself, within his memory. There he could relive the story of his life, a life that had moved through space and time, now captured in those countless rooms of his memory. It probably happens to us all, to lesser degrees for we are not destined, as Tony Judt notes when he thinks that he can no longer travel by train and be in solitude, to no longer be in movement, in a going from one place to another, but to be doomed to an eternal heartbreaking being.  As he wrote: “no more rural country halts, no more solitude: no more becoming, just interminable being.”

Often we need a nudge, an object or a sound, a voice that makes a scene or a feeling come alive. Many of our memories involve others, interactions. But many are solitary. While the rooms of my memory chalet contain some I would prefer locking in a closet, there are others that can recreate a moment, an hour, of my life that depends solely on me. They were not shared. They are now hidden parts of who I am. Memories therefore just mine, to be enjoyed or perhaps feared, at times merging with memories of others, but most often alone, those of a child who walked alone.

1940s

School is over. I no longer have to pay attention to anyone else as I wander past the A&P and Woolworths, down the hill to the crossroads with their traffic lights. It’s a four-way intersection and it’s tempting to jaywalk, not to have to wait till the left lane turns green, after having crossed the right lane. We are always impatient in life, impatient to get somewhere. But not when we are young and attuned only to our surroundings. 

It is still a relatively long stretch after crossing the bridge over the Merrimack River. I pass the library where I may stop and get a book. At the college where my father teaches, I continue to the grove behind the dormitory and wander around the pond, making paths and homes for gnomes and fairies with pebbles and acorn caps. There is no one else around. The students are all still in class.  If my father has a faculty meeting, I decide to go home on my own. It is probably a couple of miles, first along the streets laid out in parallel squares, with their neat clapboard houses and lawns. They gradually thin out, and I walk along the path flanking the highway and the railway tracks, kicking up the dust, lingering to look at the goldenrods and the stalks of milkweed with their hairy leaves and sticky sap as I break off a flower. There are daises, and black-eyed susans. A train rumbles by on high.  Sometimes there are freight trains where I think my sister and  I once counted as many as 100 cars, all painted red. And later when I go to Boston on my own, soot  enters through the open window from the smoke billowing from the engine. Those were other times. I finally get to the underpass, cut across by the tall elm tree (now, like its peers, no more than a memory), across the fields and up the slope to the farmhouse. 

It’s not the same as when I take time off on the farm, and go up the road used only by the tractor to the hemlock grove where I might find a couple of pink ladyslippers hidden in the moss. The violets were in the tall grass back in the apple orchard, the poison ivy, turning scarlet in the fall and to be kept at due distance, prefers sunny stone walls. Sometimes I saddle up Blue, the horse, and go as far as our property goes. Once he was skittish and I tumbled into a brook that flowed into the Merrimack. The alewives one finds there are too bony to eat. The solitude here is different, for here I have no goal. No one seems to be worried as to when I get home. As long as I am there for dinner or in time to do the chores. It was only when I was in the second grade and once stopped to play with friends on my way home from school that my parents came looking for me. Wouldn’t have been a problem had there been iPhones, but they were still far in the future. Can time be divided into a before and after iPhones? Now it is all too easy to keep check on your children – and probably your spouse. 

A solitary child, to then become a Watcher before being submerged in the everyday tide of humanity, creating, unawares, a store of memories.