The house of memory

            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.