Read Of Time and Memory Online

Authors: Don J. Snyder

Of Time and Memory (3 page)

BOOK: Of Time and Memory
12.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“I've been thinking about something,” I said to Colleen. “What if I went to Pennsylvania and tried to find out everything I could about Peggy. I mean if I could tell my father his own love story now that he can't remember it. It could be a gift I give to him, while there's still time. I think I owe him that.”

Colleen gave me back the photograph. “You owe it to yourself, too,” she said.

I didn't see it like that. Not then anyway.

Chapter Three

T
hat winter I was on the road, traveling a hundred miles from home each week to teach at a small college. I would leave the house early Monday morning, spend two nights in a motel, then drive home Wednesday night. A true roadside motel, one where you can sit outside the door to your room in a little plastic chair, put your feet up on the bumper of your car, and watch the traffic pass. In such a place your life can feel temporary and no more complicated than the three or four things you line up on the glass shelf above the bathroom sink. Or what you put on the bedside table.

I always placed the photograph there, standing it up against the ceramic lamp. It had become something more real in my life than what was bringing me to the motel each week. When I was home one weekend Cara put it beside her on her bedside table. I had already left on Monday morning and was in town putting gas into the car when I remembered and drove all the way back home and took it from Cara's table.

I felt self-conscious about it and glad that I had managed to retrieve the photograph and leave the house again without being seen. And that night in the motel I was thinking how I would explain this to anyone, what logic or reason I could have summoned to make it seem like it wasn't the beginning of an obsession. I was lying on the bed watching fat
snowflakes land on the roof of my car, when the telephone rang on the bedside table. It was Jack calling to tell me that he had scored a goal in his hockey game that evening. I made him describe the play in slow motion so I could see him in my mind breaking in from the blue line with the puck on his stick, driving hard to his right, white shavings of ice spraying from his blades, then wheeling across the face of the goal, holding the puck out toward the goalie, tantalizing him with it until, at the precise second when the goalie drops down to reach for it, he snaps his stick and sails the puck into the upper right corner of the net.

“I wish you'd been here,” he told me.

“I won't miss any more games,” I said. It was what I needed to say for my own sake more than his. I'm a busy man with four children whose lives I need to be a part of. I don't need to be searching the past, I need to be living right now in the present tense where my children live so that they don't have to go searching their past someday to find out who the hell
I
was.

I could balance the scales this way until I glanced at the photograph again, or until I shut off the light and tried to fall asleep with my brother's warning banging inside my head.

Even then, it isn't easy to acknowledge certain things. We tell ourselves what is obviously true—
that we don't have forever
—but until we feel this in some deep part of ourselves, we go on with our busy lives, leaving the truth behind while we worry about the balance in our checking account.

I felt it the next night when I was driving home on a back road in the northern part of Maine. I felt a longing to decide something and to set it down in front of Colleen, to put words to the feeling in order to make it real before it could vanish again. I was dreaming myself home, already by her side, when I saw bright lights way out ahead, off in the
distance, like a halo washed across the dark sky. I was feeling the loneliness of the road and this cheered me, the thought that the lights might be the town where I had attended college. I drove faster, eager to come upon that friendly town again. But soon the lights up ahead became too bright to be that small town and my spirits began to sink. And then I came upon it—a Wal-Mart standing high up on a hill, surrounded by the blinding arc lights that one associates with prisons. I pulled off to the side of the road and stared at the cinder-block monstrosity and I could not account for why it made me feel so empty. It was crazy, I know, but I started to wonder if all of us have been diminished in some vital way by the age in which we are living, an age when Wal-Marts are summoning us from hillsides across the republic. Did our mothers and fathers hold something fine between them that has been lost to us? Those young people in the old black-and-white photographs, were they trying to warn us of something? Were they trying to tell us that if we weren't careful we might reach a point where much of the fabric of what had always been perceived to be good in America we'd left behind somewhere, left it behind thoughtlessly, without making a choice, and we had become a people cast out, or
lured
out of our own lives into this new landscape where the only thing familiar to us is the artless chain of roadside stores, motels, and restaurants.

I thought again of Colleen at home and about the landscape of our life. Could I possibly lose her? Was there a time coming when I might lose her and never find her again in the dark countryside, the way my father had lost my mother? There they were in their wedding-car photograph, so fit and fine and so blind to the end that was rushing to meet them.

Those moments on the side of the road before the blazing Wal-Mart made me feel like taking hold of something meaningful.

I began to drive hard through the black night, all the elaborate purposes of my life, all the false starts and wrong turns distilled to the one simple act of reaching home. I kept pressing down hard on the accelerator but for some reason I was unable to close the distance; the miles seemed to be dividing and multiplying while I was frozen in place on a road that kept moving out ahead of me, pouring out of itself and spreading farther and farther into the distance.

In the long succession of dark, empty miles I began to feel my father's loss. The loss of hope and love and youth and promise. The loss of immunity. Coming upon my driveway, I pulled the car to a stop and hurried up the porch stairs.

Home.

The dog greets me at the door and leads me through the dark rooms to the kitchen where Colleen has left the stove light on and a plate of food in the refrigerator. I eat standing at the sink, already losing some of the resolve I had felt on the dark highway. This is where we are. Isn't it enough just to be here and to feel the privilege of our life? Who, throughout history, could have had it any better than we do now? How sweet this life of ours, busy and fast and, yes, there is plenty for us to worry about, and we may curse the shallowness of this age and the Wal-Marts riding like cruise ships along the horizon, but hell, it is all so fine, isn't it? I feel myself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with every other husband and wife who are opening their eyes to the end of a century and gazing across their best intentions and their most exquisite failures to the silent borders of time. All we need is to love each other in the best way. To see our children joyful in our closeness. Surely nothing matters more to us than this.

Then I walk out into the living room and pause at the bottom of the stairs. When the house is this quiet I can hear my children breathing in their sleep. How fit and essential is this sound that seems to carry the rhythm of a slow and meaningful journey, a rhythm that sets the house trembling to its cadence.

The dog and I go reverently from bed to bed, kissing a blessing to each sleeping child until, at last, I am standing in the presence of my wife's plain beauty, her face on the pillow, the magazine she was reading on the floor, a night-light left on. The dog finds her place beneath my desk. I take off my shirt and drape it over a chair. There is moonlight on the floor and when I step through it I am suddenly surrounded again by that startling stillness. It seems as if every object in the room has just settled behind a gust of wind that has cleared away everything between me and an understanding of what I must do next in this world: the beautiful woman on the drive-in movie screen far away across the valley and up the hillside, the woman whose voice I tried to hear forty years ago, I have followed to this woman who is humming dreamily to herself as I lean against her. I can hear my wife hold her breath when I lay my palms against her soft skin. For a long time neither of us moves. I feel we are caught then in both the slow shadow of history and the sudden turn of fate.

Chapter Four

A
fter that night I gave myself over to it.

For years I had kept journals for each of my children, which began with a description of their birth and continued on until they were six or seven, when all the pages were filled. Only Cara's had blank pages left, and on the first of these pages I wrote that I was going to go searching for her grandmother. I taped the wedding-car photograph on the same page. I stood up to put the journal on her shelf and when I glanced down again at the photograph it was like I was seeing it for the first time. It is a square, four-inch-by-four-inch picture dominated by the two-inch-by-two-inch car in the center foreground. The car is parked along the right side of the street, facing away from the viewer, a front and rear tire up against the curb. To the left, across the narrow street, stand two large wood-frame houses with porches and overhanging porch roofs in front and wide wooden front steps that descend to the sidewalk.

In the background of the photograph, toward the end of the sidewalk that leads away from the viewer, perhaps fifty feet of actual distance ahead of the wedding car, there is a boy. I had not seen him before because he is wearing a dark double-breasted coat that is rendered shapeless against the dark background of the picture. The collar is turned up and
conceals all but his chin. He has his hands in his coat pockets. The cuffs of his trousers fall over his shoes. His light-colored hair is pushed to the right across his forehead. A man, perhaps his father, is walking just ahead of him, but the boy has stopped and completely turned around and is looking back at the wedding car. There is just enough light on the boy's face to make out his features. He looks to be eight or nine years old and bears an unmistakable resemblance to me at that age. In all the photographs of myself that I have ever seen I look just like him. I closed my eyes and then opened them. Then again. Each time the boy seemed to be re-entering the photograph, just having stepped into the picture from the blackness behind him.

The next night I went to each of my children in their beds, knelt down with the photograph, and asked them who the boy was. They all said it was me, and only Erin, my oldest child, questioned the mathematics.

“You weren't born before the wedding,” she said. “I don't get it.”

“You're right, it couldn't be me,” I told her.

“But it is,” she said.

“I know.”

I called my father that same night. We talked for a while about the college football teams that had been chosen for bowl games. He was a Penn State partisan and he told me that he wasn't going to miss the game on New Year's Day.

“Maybe I'll watch it with you,” I told him.

This didn't register with him. Instead he told me he had been going to a lot of funerals lately for all his old buddies from his 1944 high school football team. “Just last week
I bumped into Ozzie Newcomb at Ed Slater's funeral. I don't know how much longer Ozzie will live. I don't know how all these big strong boys from the football team can die this way.”

He said he still wished that he had been big enough to play football as a boy. Instead he was the team waterboy.

I asked him if it would be all right if I came to see him. “We can watch the Penn State game together,” I said again.

“It's a long trip for you.”

“Not that long. Eight or nine hours.”

“Longer than that, I think.”

“It's okay, Dad. I was hoping we could talk a little about Peggy. I thought we might just talk for a little while about her.”

“Your mother was working at the telephone company when I met her. She was an operator.”

A telephone operator?

My mind went blank for a moment; my father was still talking at the other end but I had drifted far away. When I came back to his voice, it was with the realization that I was forty-seven years old and this was the first concrete detail about her that my father had ever passed on to me. I had never been to her grave, I had no idea how many days she lived after I was born, how old she was when she died, or what had been the cause of her death. Growing up with my father, I had always known in some part of my comprehension that talking about my dead mother was too painful for him. Because she had died when their love was new and they were still in the heat of their passion for each other, her death had cut an opening in him so that he was never the same and he could never speak about her. It is true that we all have a beginning, a middle, and an end to our lives, but they don't
always come in that order; even as a young boy I had known through intuition that by the time I knew my father he had already been through the beginning and the end of his life, and he was just living out the long middle part trying not to remember what had already happened to him.

But now he had told me that she worked as a telephone operator. I could picture the girl in the wedding photograph going to work every day, probably sitting in a room full of young women wearing headsets. This simple detail from my father, and the vivid picture it inspired of her
alive
in a life that preceded me, rather than dead at a point in time after I was born, made all the difference.

On New Year's Day I threw a few things into the car and began the drive to Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where my father and stepmother lived. They had moved there after he retired from the ministry nine years earlier but I had never been to see them there and I had to call my brother for directions.

BOOK: Of Time and Memory
12.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Blind Man With a Pistol by Chester Himes
Son of Serge Bastarde by John Dummer
Playing Games by Jill Myles
The War With Earth by Leo Frankowski, Dave Grossman
Fade Away and Radiate by Michele Lang
Impossible Magic by Boyd, Abigail
Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz
In the Garden of Temptation by Cynthia Wicklund