Remembrance

Nostalgia likes to sneak up on you, especially when it revolves around something not particularly important, yet something you haven’t managed to forget quite yet.

I keep having flashes of memories about the boy from college who lived in a house with a porch painted royal blue. He had a lone John Denver record thumb tacked to his wall, or maybe it was John Mellencamp; the “J” in the name is the only particular sticking in my mind after all these years. He played football once, before he spent his free time getting high and complaining about student loans. There was something there once, something I kept going back for even though I could never put my finger on it.

He told me about the town he grew up in and how you could never miss the exit off the freeway because there was a massive Lion’s Den store right next to it. Sometimes he played acoustic at this hole in the wall bar I wasn’t old enough to get into.

It’s entrancing the way my daydreams drift from unconnected moments in the past to days that still could be or moments that haven’t happened yet but might. There are stretches of time I allow myself to live in a memory for a little while, relishing in the way they can feel like sunshine washing over my skin during the first warm day in spring. There are some people who only live on in memory now, swept away from my periphery by the river of life, always flowing and branching off in every direction.

I don’t know how true it is that your mind stores away every memory and every thing you’ve experienced. All I know is I have trouble remembering the sound of my grandmother’s voice. I can recall these seemingly unimportant people, places, and things but there are precious bits of my life I can never get my hands around to hold onto. When I was young, maybe five or so, my grandma drove my brother and I to church with Casey Kasem tuned in on the radio. He was known to me as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo and I will never hear his voice without conjuring up images of my grandmother. I have a brief recollection of walking out to her car after church one day while she dug through her trunk looking for gifts she brought us from New Orleans. She never travelled without sending a post card or bringing back a trinket; the Big Easy produced a porcelain headed court jester doll for me. Somewhere in a box at my mothers all of those bits and baubles are delicately packed up.

Then there’s Morrison’s, the drive inn in Logan, West Virginia near the heart of what used to be coal mining country, where we stopped to get hot dogs on the way home from a family reunion. West Virginia will always be talk of how terrifying the drive down narrow, wending roads was from Ohio before they blasted the mountains to build the highway. I’ve seen photos of the out of the way graves of loved ones I never met perched atop other mountains, nearly impossible to reach with nature creeping in to claim them. Someone usually goes to clear away the brush and leave fresh flowers. Even after 28 years I’m learning about things, like the time my grandma walked one of the family cows down to the creek and it got loose from its halter, trotting down the road. There was a woman who told her once never to wear underwear when you sleep or it’ll cut off your circulation.

These are the places and times I inhabit when my mind goes wandering. To the nights my mom read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to me before bed in the house on Sundew. Opening up the window in the basement because it led to the backyard where I could say hello to the dogs as they roamed. The familiar sound of nails clicking on a wood floor while our old pug Otis followed me around like a shadow. The day the boy who drove me to school during late start decided he would show up to get me for the rest of the year, and years later when from hundreds or thousands of miles away he told me he wished he would have had the guts to call me his back then. He’s married with a kid now and I can’t believe I can still recall all of it.

Is this the way memories come to everyone else? In the smallest fragments from the most ordinary times; little pockets of pure happiness while we’re just busy trying to get by.