Posted tagged ‘memories’

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“Every man’s memory is his private literature.”

June 6, 2011

Yesterday all was well and today looks like a great day. The sun is so bright it’s almost blinding. I have an errands, but I’m putting them off until later so I can loll on the deck with a cold drink and my newest book, The Jefferson Key. My irrigation guy came by this morning and turned on the lawn system and my outside shower. My landscaper, who lives next door, was with him, and I asked him to have a few things done in my yard. The last of my flowers are waiting for planting, weeds in the front need to go to their heavenly rewards and the backyard has to be weed-whacked. Tomorrow, he said.

Today is D-Day. My mother once had a D-Day party and put up maps of the landing sites, played WWII music and had The Longest Day playing on the VCR. My dad used to tell us about when he was in the hospital in England during the invasion, and the wounded never seemed to stop coming. They told him our troops were getting slaughtered by heavy resistance. Most of the soldiers were pessimistic about our chances to defeat Germany. That, of course, was at the beginning. We visited a few sites on one of our trips to Europe. The Ardennes was the spookiest with its ground fog and its silence. In the woods were tank traps looking like dragon’s teeth. We passed signs for Malmedy, and my dad told us about the massacre of American prisoners of war by the “bloody Germans” as he called them. All the sites we saw and visited were new to my dad as well. He had been a sailor whose ship had been sunk by the Germans in the North Atlantic. We followed signs along the same route the Americans had taken as the army made its way inland; we visited WW II museums and stayed in Bastogne. It was a remarkable trip.

Memories of events grow dim and finally disappear over time. Each new generation loses something as the previous generations age and finally disappear. I grew up hearing all my mother’s favorite songs including her World War II favorites. I know all the words to them. My niece and nephews don’t know them, no reason why they should. The songs aren’t played any more. I remember all my dad’s World War II stories, and they have been passed down, but I suspect they’ll end with the generation behind me. They have no connections the way we did.

I am a child of the 50’s and 60’s, and I have so many memories of growing up then, memories of the things I did and what I believed. They are still vivid to me but only to me. Soon enough, they too will fade and finally disappear, and the next generation will fill the void with their own memories.

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“Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations.”

April 14, 2011

4″ of rain fell yesterday. It started raining the night before then poured all of yesterday. We even had thunder to give the rain a bit of spice. Today it’s 50°, and the sun is lurking behind light gray clouds. Gracie is busy watching the men clean the yard across the street. Their blowers were the first things I heard this morning. Today is one of Gracie’s favorite days: dump day. We’ll go as soon as I finish loading the car with my cardboard, bottles, magazines and newspapers. Did I mention the trash? She would have loved the old dump with piles of refuse and seagulls everywhere. The dump now has bins for all the recycling and bigger bins for the trash, and there are no seagulls.

When we lived in South Yarmouth, my father used to love to go to the dump. Every Sunday morning, he’d ask if anyone wanted to go with him. Guests were in big trouble as they were usually dragged along as if the dump was a tourist destination. I used to be able to see the old dump from the highway. The seagulls were always circling hoping to find a morsel. That dump too has been replaced, and from the highway, all I can see are green hills where the old dump used to be.

I sometimes drive by our old house in South Yarmouth. The only changes in the forty plus years since I lived there are an addition added to the kitchen side and a fence in the back. My bedroom was on the first floor as was my brother’s. I’m often tempted to stop and peek in the windows, but I can still see every room in my mind’s eye. It’s the same with the house we left to move to the cape. I remember every piece of furniture in every room. In Ghana, my house was small, four rooms, and I know every one of them as if I still lived there. My bedroom had a wall of slat windows, and I actually made curtains. They were of brown Ghanaian cloth with a design. I cut then hemmed then used string to hold them across the windows. In the living room, the light bulb hung from a long wire. I made a shade from a Bolga basket, the same ones you can now buy from catalogs. I cut a hole in the top and used pieces of a wire hanger to hold the bulb. The shade left a small circle of light on the floor below it. During the rainy season, the only time we had bugs, the circle under the lampshade was always filled with dead ones from the night before.

Well, enough with the memories. I need to get to the dump.

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“Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.”

March 28, 2011

It’s close to 11 am, and the temperature has risen to 35°, but the wind makes it feel much colder. Gracie and I were awakened today by the sounds of blowers from my neighbor’s yard. He and his men are doing spring clean up. They came here next, and it gave me hope when I saw the garden beds clear of dead leaves and branches. My herb garden already has some growth. I showed Sebastian, my neighbor and landscaper, where I wanted a raised bed for a few vegetables. He thought the spot perfect. The men removed all the dead pine branches from the backyard and blew the deck clear of leaves. It may still be cold, but when clean-up begins, I think of a warm day, a sunny deck and flowers. I’m holding on to that thought with a grasp so tight my knuckles are white.

When my sister came and stayed for a week after I had had my surgery, she experienced much the same as I had in my old town where she lives now. Sheila lived on the cape for a long time but has been gone even longer. We drove familiar streets which now have unfamiliar views. Her grammar school sits empty, no longer used. The printing shop where she worked for so long was torn down to make way for a park which is right by the water. The park is an odd one with small hills and only a few benches. She was a bit amazed by all the changes. I knew exactly how she felt.

The square in the town where I grew up has changed. A whole block has been torn down. It used to hold small shops and stores like the shoe repair and a drug store. At first I was horrified because my childhood is wound around the memories of those stores. I have since adjusted to an adult view and have saved my childhood square in special memory drawers. Many of the old buildings still remain, but they have became something else. If I had grandchildren, I would walk them through the square and bore them with stories of what was.

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“Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.”

September 23, 2010

The last two days have been magnificent, coffee and papers on the deck mornings and lazy in the sun afternoons. This morning two nuthatches reprimanded me. They weren’t at all pleased to find the feeders empty. Feeling guilty, I went to the car, brought in the new bag of seed, filled the feeders then cleaned and filled the birdbath. The birds arrived in droves, and I went back to my coffee and papers.

I have odd memories of events which happened when I was really little. They seem to have no context and stand singly. One memory has to do with a pond and a half submerged row boat. I remember water lilies and leeches and my mother screaming. I can still see white Adirondack chairs standing by the water, and I have a hazy memory of my father’s aunt. I don’t remember my great-grandmother, on my father’s side, but I can still see the narrow wooden stairs in her house which connected one floor with another. I do remember my great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, who used to sit by the giant heater in my grandmother’s living room. He scared me, and I’d run by him as quickly as I could. I didn’t remember why I ran until my mother told me he once took my Easter basket away.

At 37 Washington Ave., the stairs had a landing. I remember playing there with my dolls. I was probably no older than five or six as we were still there when my sister, five years younger than I, was born. 16 Washington Ave. was where we moved shortly after that. I always think it funny that the houses are remembered by their numbers.

I have tons of memories of Christmas though most of them have jumbled together over the years. For some reason, though, I remember the ice skates. They were old ones, the kind that buckled to your shoes. When I first woke up, they weren’t under the tree. Later that day they were. When I asked my mother, she told me I must have missed them, but I knew I hadn’t.

My last memory stills make me laugh. I wore braces for years, including the ones where tiny elastics were stretched from my lower to my upper braces. I remember sitting behind my father in the car and talking when one elastic flew  out of my mouth and hit him in the back of the neck. He swatted his neck like he’d been bitten by a wasp. I suppose I must have said something, but I don’t remember it. Maybe I just laughed.

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“I stopped reading science fiction once I saw that the UFO was real. It became science fact that just hasn’t been proven yet.”

September 21, 2010

It was an early morning appointment which put me behind, an alarm setting early morning appointment. It was a shock when I first heard the radio and saw the time. I have come to love waking up whenever and slowly making my way into the day.

On the way back from Hyannis, I took the long way home, Route 28. I noticed some buildings have disappeared since I last took that road. One was a guest house where college kids used to stay all summer. A dirt filled lot sits where the house used to stand. Friendly’s has been torn down, and an almost completed CVS will replace it. Just what we need, another CVS, a behemoth with no local personality or flavor. As I was driving, I saw so many other changes and remembered what some of the buildings used to be. Johnnie Yee’s was our favorite Chinese restaurant. It’s now a buffet place catering to tourists, a squat, gray building with no personality. Fruitland was an all purpose store with a meat counter and a great variety of groceries. It was reincarnated several times but nothing lasted. It’s now an empty building. The Gay Nineties was a perfect place to take company to eat good food and listen to great music. It was right across the street from the Barefoot Trader Gift Shop. The two buildings are still there. The Gay Nineties has been replaced by an antique store and the gift shop has become outlet stores including Bass shoes and a shirt company. My parents used to bring relatives to the Compass Lounge where the waiters and waitresses would break into song, mostly show songs. Later it became a nightclub. Now it’s a CVS.

I got tired of 28 so I took the back road through the historical district. The shoe repair shop is still there, and it was open. It reminded me of the cobbler’s shop in the town where I grew up. I never saw the cobbler standing. He was always bent over one of those metal shoes lasts working on resoling somebody’s shoe. He wore an apron. A pile of shoes stretched across and filled the counter. Pairs were tied together with a tag. The shop smelled of polish and leather.

I swear we have been invaded, and we don’t know it. The aliens are disguised as workers in CVS stores across the country. The stores all look alike, these Stepford stores, and enough will soon be build so the aliens can show their hands or suction cups or webfeet or whatever it is theses aliens have. The one thing I know is germs won’t defeat this bunch.

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“A small town is a place where there’s no place to go where you shouldn’t.”

June 9, 2010

The morning is chilly. When I woke up, I was glad for Gracie and the warmth of her body. It was even cool enough to bring my furry slippers out of their seasonal retirement. The sun this morning looks muted. It sits behind grayish white clouds. Maybe it will rain was the best the weatherman could do.

My town had the usual stores, the sorts every small town had back then. It also had a hospital, a zoo and a town pool. It had one movie theater, a couple of bowling alleys, a miniature golf course, a Dairy Queen and O’Grady’s diner. My town always felt huge to me. The Independent was the town newspaper. It was published once a week and was crammed with every tidbit of town news. We knew the grandsons of the Riley family were visiting and that the Roberts had celebrated an anniversary. All the pages and stories were filled with names of locals. I even made it myself a few times. The police blotter listed every call. We knew whose cat was caught in a tree and what old lady heard strange noises at night. For a short while, when I was in elementary school, I delivered the Independent. When I was in high school, I wrote a weekly column in the summer about the drill team and the competitions we had every weekend. I loved seeing my by-line. The fire station in town was an old brick building covered in ivy. It was across the street from the town hall. On the grounds of the town hall was a small shaded walkway with a few benches. A World War II memorial in front of the building named every resident who had served. I always stopped to read my father’s name.

In my memories, that town, where I grew up, was idyllic, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating. It had everything a kid could want. We had woods, railroad trains and tracks, Saturday matinees, berry picking spots, the swamp, an ice skating rink in winter and a playground in the summer with its games and sports and all sorts of handcrafts. All of my friends lived there.

When I was forced to move to the cape, I was devastated. I went from everything to nothing. On most weekends that first year I took the bus back to my town. Gradually, though, those bus trips became less frequent and then they stopped. I stayed home.

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“My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune.”

May 9, 2010

It is a beautiful, sunny Mother’s Day.

This morning I filled my heart with memories of my mother. Thinking about her made me smile. I miss her today as I do every day.

My mother had a generosity of spirit. She was funny and smart and the belle of every ball. She always had music going in the kitchen as she worked so she could sing along. She played Frank and Tony and Johnny and from her I learned the old songs. My mother drew all the relatives, and her house was filled. My cousins visited often. She was their favorite aunty. My mother loved to play Big Boggle, and we’d sit for hours at the kitchen table and play so many games we’d lose track of the time. Christmas was always amazing, and she passed this love to all of us. We traveled together, she and I, and my mother was game for anything. I remember Italy and my mother and me after dinner at the hotel bar where she’d enjoy her cognac. She never had it any other time, but we’re on vacation she said and anything goes. I talked to her just about every day, as did my sisters. I loved it when she came to visit. We’d shop, have dinner out then play games at night. I always waited on her when was here. I figured it was the least I could do.

My mother loved extreme weather shows, TV judges and crime. She never missed Judge Judy. She also liked quiz shows and she and I used to play Jeopardy together on the phone at night. She always had a crossword puzzle book with a pen inside on the table beside her chair, and I used to try and fill in some of the blanks. On the dining room table was often a jig saw puzzle, and we all stopped to add pieces on the way to the kitchen. My mother loved a good time.

She did get feisty, and I remember flying slippers aimed at my head when I was a kid. She expertly used mother’s guilt and, “I’ll do it myself,” was her favorite weapon. We sometimes drove her crazy, and she let us know, none too quietly.We never argued over politics. She kept her opinions close. We sometimes argued over other things, but the arguments never lasted long.

I still think to reach for the phone and call my mother when I see something interesting or have a question I know only she can answer. When I woke up this morning, my first thought was of her.

Happy Mother’s Day.

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“A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever.”

April 15, 2010

In the summer, we love the breeze off the ocean, but in the spring, on days like today, it’s chilling. The sun just isn’t warm enough yet.

The tops of the pine trees are swaying in the wind, Gracie and Fern are jostling for spots by the front door in the sun and my heat went on this morning. It’s the start of an average day.

My life has seemed to hinge on serendipity. I get to the proverbial fork in the road, toss a coin and start walking: heads to the left and tails to the right. The scenery has been spectacular.

I have favorite places. Some are close at hand. I love living near the ocean. Nothing is more beautiful than a sunrise or a sunset on the water. A walk on the beach is an adventure. The sounds are amazing: loud and raucous seagulls, waves hitting the shore and the squeak of  my feet as I walk through the sand. I still stop and pick up seashells. When I was a kid, they were my favorite souvenir, still are I think. By the time I get to the car, my pockets are filled with seashells, my arms with driftwood and my shoes with sand.

I have favorite places far away. Some I visited only once. Ghana doesn’t count. It was home. The old center of Quito, standing astride the equator, the B&B in Youghal, Ireland, Stonehenge in the distance as I walked from Salisbury, the donkey carts on the roads in the Douro Valley and flying over the Andes are still vivid in my memories.

The deck in summer has now become my favorite place of all. It is where I start my day with coffee and the newspapers. By afternoon it’s a good book, lunch and maybe a nap in the sun. At night, it’s candles and breezes and dinners with friends. It’s laughter and companionship. It’s the prettiest spot of all.

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