My
childhood was not particularly exceptional.
The bus drove me to school in the morning and drove me home again at
night. My mother made dinner, I cleaned
the dishes, I listened to my father play the piano.
In the summers we
would travel to Seattle, where I would visit grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Mom, Dad, and I would sit on Grandma
Bondelid’s worn sofa as she rocked in her wooden chair, reliving the stories of
her youth, one much more remarkable than my own. She told us over and over of the times she rode
her horse down Dakota fields, herded the sheep, looked after the cattle.
“They said if you
fell off your horse one hundred times, you were an expert rider. Well, I’d fallen off my horse two hundred times.”
Grandma
couldn’t tell you what had happened that morning. Eventually, she couldn’t tell you who I was,
or that her son, my father, was grown and living in Philadelphia. But she always remembered the stories of her
horses and the wide fields of South Dakota in 1925.
Sunlight
reflected off the lake outside and glistened on the walls of her small
condo. A cool breeze circled the living
room in anticipation of her return to old memories and lucidity.
“There
was a bounty on coyotes in those days,” she would say of the late 1920s in
South Dakota, her cheeks flushing with sudden vitality, her eyes showing their
first signs of life all afternoon. “Coyotes
were a real pest, and would kill the sheep.
You got fifty dollars if you turned in their pelts. Well, I would set coyote traps, and collect
them once they were dead. I killed three
in two days, and got one hundred and fifty dollars for their pelts.
“Now, the local
newspaper would publish anything in those days, and so someone wrote an article
about the coyotes I had killed. The
article made its way out to a newspaper in California, and one day I received a
letter from a man in San Diego saying he was looking for a wife who was feisty
and a hard worker. He asked if I would
consider going out there to marry him.
Auntie Lulu wrote back to him, explaining that I was twelve years old
and would not be leaving home.”
We knew better
than to interrupt Grandma when she told these stories. As soon as her reverie was halted, the color
drained from her face, she lost all sense of who and where she was, and she
became agitated, unwilling to accept that her mind was demented. “I can still turn cartwheels!” she would
wheeze defensively in her hysteria.
Our time with her,
therefore, was devoted to letting her relive the stories we’d heard dozens of times,
stories that never grew old despite their wear.
They sobered her elusive mind, and evoked the spirit lost beneath her
dementia. Those stories were a part of
her, and without them, she could not have lived. They were the breath in her lungs. They were her soul’s stories.
What moments in my
own life would I always remember with such precision and fondness? What moments could I never forget, even in
spite of the vile erosion of memory I, too, could one day face? Certainly I could never forget those summer
afternoons, sitting on the couch, listening to my grandmother coming to life,
sharing memories of a life I can hardly comprehend.
I could never
forget the morning I woke up to find a small handful of a puppy with white
cotton fur and a vigorously wagging tail, curled up next to the fireplace. I could never forget the day I said goodbye
to that dog thirteen years later, and the grief that shattered my heart and led
me to ponder tales of afterlife.
I could never
forget the day my mother left me at school for the first time, and I watched
her through the window as she climbed into her old Honda Civic and drove
away. I could never forget how alone I
felt at that moment, as though the entire world had shut down and only I
remained. This was a feeling I would
revisit years later when my parents left me at college for the first time, and
again when I found myself all alone on my first trip to London, weaving through
terminals at Heathrow Airport and the tube stations, my navigational skills
suddenly failing me.
I could never
forget the first day I worked at the college job I fell in love with, when the
trainer pulled me aside from the cash register and told me I possessed the raw
materials to do anything I wanted in my life, and how for the first time I
believed it.
I could never
forget those moments that expanded my soul, that shaped my being, that fed my
craving for life. No, perhaps I never rode
a horse or trapped a coyote like my grandmother did. The story of my own upbringing is likely the
story of many. But like my grandmother, it
was an honest, sturdy youth, one with heart, one that would always hold life
and house my very breath.
