Edges

Small trips in time on the edges of memory.

Edges

There are just some things that reside on the very edges of memory. They have stuck with me through the years, and in some cases have become richer and more meaningfully precious. One of the earliest feeling memories in this collection is of looking down a very narrow two-lane road, a part of which passes right by a rocky pebble strewn shore, with evergreens of varied ages and heights lined up upon either side. It is cloudy overhead, as if it is about to storm and the hot wind blows out from the road upon me followed by the cool that a storm often brings. This may be a hazy and distant memory of being two years old and looking upon my first home of memory while we lived in Groton. It is a fleeting vision of the white lined edges of the road, the deep golden painted lines to not pass to the left, a deeper hue because of the dark overcast sky. I must have remembered it only because I was afraid perhaps. I have long since lost any fear the memory may have held. Now it is just there.

The second is clearly of being at the Christmas tree farm in upstate New York. Throughout my childhood my father was always insistent upon having an actual live Christmas tree. He stubbornly refused for ages my mother's wheedling to acquire and keep a fake tree, which she insisted would be easier to set up, decorate, keep decorated, easier to undecorate when time, and the easiest to subsequently put away, all easier than a live tree could ever be. She was correct of course, and eventually, long after us kids have left the house, he has given in and now uses a fake Christmas tree.

This memory starts looking at .. viewing .. seeing .. the ground, covered in inches of snow. It is perhaps the cleanest snow I have ever seen until then as a four-year-old and the cleanest I have ever seen since. It covers everything in sight all around us, including all the Christmas trees, with only bits of dark green sticking out as contrast to the crisp clean white here and there upon every tree. Tracks run through the snow from various kinds of sleds and possibly even a snow mobile that originally carved the path through the fields of Christmas trees awaiting their potential harvest. The trees grow up close to the sides of the track, and occasionally a songbird is flushed out of the Christmas trees as the shape of my father trudges ahead, pulling the twine rope that pulls our own sled through the snow along the track. I think I am trudging along behind.

I am close to the snow, because the trees all seem exceptionally tall even though they're just Christmas trees, and the memory of my father is also tall in front of me, in jeans and his dark blue U.S. Navy deck jacket and hunter's orange knit cap. For whatever reason, in this memory I feel very close to the ground, like a little kid would I suppose. I have a puffy winter coat and bright red yarn mittens. I can clearly remember the mittens connected at the sleeve ends with a single long strand of yarn that went through the arms of your coat to keep from losing them. The sun has slowly risen to the bitter end of the late morning in a clear light blue early winter sky, and the sunlight hits the dark jagged teeth of the bladed bow saw my father carries in his other hand. They look like black shark's teeth hit by the sunlight now that I think of them.

Everything starts to get bright and wet and slushy as the snow just now begins to slowly melt. I can remember it getting harder and harder to follow the track, and a fleeting memory of falling further behind with a pronounced dripping sound all around me until the sled stops up ahead. I don't remember anything else from this excursion even though I have no doubt we selected a tree, cut it down and pulled it out on the sled tied down with twine. Unfortunately, the memory doesn't include this, just the snow, the track, the sled, the growing late morning light, Dad, the bow saw which he probably still has, and the slush of the start of noon.

Another scene that fleets at the edge of memory starts in the midst of a shopping mall of some kind. I am with my mother and there's a darkness in the hall of the mall where we stop at the front of a small restaurant with the sign of a mustached man with a wide smile. The restaurant sells pizza by the slice. My father appears and we part from him as he goes to another part of the mall, probably Sears, to look at an appliance or tool or some such. He's not in uniform in my memory of this so I'm not sure what he went to do. My mother takes me to a toy store of some sort, and I settle upon a toy escalator with a workable bucket for the sand box.

At home with the toy bucket escalator, we're clearly at the townhouse we lived at when I was three years old in Hampton Roads Virginia. There is a small downstairs with a small living room, home to another two fleeting memories as a four-year-old before we moved away, and then a stairway goes up to the right to the bedrooms upstairs which I cannot remember at all. The hall passes a short galley kitchen, a powder room and opens up to the tiny dining room with a sliding glass door that opens up to the equally small privacy fenced back "yard" which is only large enough for a small sand box, a charcoal grill and a couple of lawn chairs. I go out back with my escalator and somehow soon after a couple of play shovelfuls I get a cut or pinch on one of my fingers. It turns into a deep purplish red, which I don't think I had really encountered before. Alarmed I ran inside, and my mother placed an ice cube swathed in gauze on it and then put a band aid on it after that. She pulls a small toy beach pail out of the cupboard under the kitchen sink and pulls out a green lime-flavored Lifesavers brand lollipop which she unwraps and hands to me. Mollified I return outside to vanquish the sandbox once again. The memory draws to a close.

Up state New York. Many many clear and happy memories here. We were stationed there for a four-year term while my father completed prototype for the U.S. Navy. A particularly odd memory however is one that, like these others, remains somewhat vague and inexplicable, but I still savor and recall from time to time, nonetheless. It begins with a late morning session of play outside in the back yard behind the little double-wide trailer we lived in at the Country Manor Trailer Park loop in the countryside outside of the little town my little brother would be born in. I can't recall if he is here yet or not in this particular memory, but if he was he would just be a small newborn. I am alone on the swing set. My father is also outside trying to quickly finish some kind of outside chore. I think it was mowing in the small field to the left side of the trailer as you faced it from the loop road. The sky is gray and keeps getting grayer and darker. I swing the swing and wait and watch as the coming storm develops over top of us. I'm not aware of how the storm works, but I am aware that it is going to happen at some point, and I'm excited because I am certain of my prediction. Perhaps this is what the memory is really about. It was my first prediction grounded in certainty of conviction. The grass was wet with dew, which must have made the mowing difficult. The droning growl of the mower is in the background of my mind and imagination, and it amplified each time my Dad lifted the mower off the front wheels onto the back wheels to pivot the mower in a turn so he could follow the line of grown grass back and forth.

My step grandfather Lou had explained the lightning at night when they were there with me while my little brother was born at the local hospital. "Heat lightning" was still a concept back in the late 80's and 90's, used to explain the flashes of lightning at night after a hot summer day had ended. No one in everyday life really knew back then that there was really no such thing, it was really just lightning from a storm far or not too far away. The lightning had flashed as he drove us back that night in his big Ford touring van from a late dinner out. He liked to eat out at very nice restaurants and take a long time doing it. We got out of the van, and we both looked up at the sky, filled with stars back then, and under them, a flash as the lightning lit up the horizon. No thunder sounded and so he looked at me and said, "ah the heat lightning is out. When it was a very hot day, sometimes it makes lightning with no thunder at night." For whatever reason, this made perfect sense to my four-year-old mind at the time. It made me feel good about it in any case.

As a six- or seven-year-old, while living the end of our time in upstate New York, I was in a fight with some other kid who bullied my three or four-year-old little brother. This memory is not very clear, but I recall my parents had taken us to a small stadium or ball field of some sort that had low bleachers, and a small playground right behind the bleachers. The bleachers were probably only two or three tiers high. Parents of young children could sit in the bleachers and watch whatever game or event was on the field and simply turn around in order to see whatever their young and bored children were doing in the little playground whenever they wished. This perhaps would still seem unsafe and imprudent by standards today, but one should bear in mind that this was back in the very early 90's by this time and we were a great country then, so things still seemed very safe to our imaginations at this time. I could literally see the backs and rear ends of my parents in the bleachers and could even walk up to them from the little playground and touch them if I wanted to, so it was probably not so very unsafe, but I could see why someone today would determine that it was. In any case, I recall playing on a sort of small low dome shaped "jungle gym" as best as I could at that time and looking over about a few yards away, I had just caught in time some other little bully had just shoved my little three- about to turn four-year old brother over into the dirt near a light pole, one of a few that illuminated the early evening as it settled over the little playground and bleachers. I looked up at the to my parents and their friends ... they hadn't seen! So I got down from the "jungle gym" and sauntered over to the offender who had moved away from the scene of his crime, my little brother now sitting up and wiping his nose with his little coat sleave, and I shoved this little punk chump back. He toppled backward like a sack of potatoes, and I determined that this wasn't satisfactory enough. So, I knelt down over him and began to pummel him with my mittened little fists for about a few seconds until his nose began to bleed. Then I stood up and declared that "only I get to shove my little brother down to the ground."

Second grade had been interrupted part way with the move back to Virginia. I lived for two months in Western Pennsylvania at my grandmother's house in DuBois while my father finalized our moving arrangements and his navy orders. We had had trouble selling the trailer, but I didn't know about that until much later in life. In any case, this last memory has to do with the beginning of my church life when we had finally arrived in our newly rented house in Hampton Roads. We started to attend church regularly, something we hadn't ever done before. My first day of Sunday school was the most interesting of the "edge of memory" category of my memories here. The memory begins with playing blocks on the floor of the Sunday school room carpet. I watched as some other children my age all took seats in little wooden chairs around a low wooden table as they knew the Sunday school teacher lady was about to come in. Before she arrives, a cocky little punk in jeans and t-shirt comes in and uses his foot to pull the chair out from under one of the other kids. I learn that this is his usual bullying stunt. The next Sunday, I sit in the same chair. I want to see if he will pull the stunt on the new kid. He saunters in, sees me in the chair, and smirks. He puts his foot behind a back leg of my chair and pulls. I promptly flop onto the floor on my butt. He distracts himself with a fit of laughter, and while he is so engaged, I got up, brushed imaginary floor dust off of my "nice pants"(more distraction) and then I suddenly grabbed his shirt collar lapels and pushed him back up against the wall, almost lifting him a centimeter off the ground. His face is shocked as he sucks in all the breath he can. I look straight into his eyes and in a matter-of-fact voice simply tell him, "You won't ever do that again." "Got it?" He shakes his head yes. I dropped him and we resumed Sunday school class. The teacher lady eventually walked in. Life went on. This kid later joined the Marines and served with distinction in Iraq. I like to think I played some small role in helping him get a clue. You're welcome Mike, wherever you now are.