The Lot

Thoughts on childhood and memory on the occasion of a great loss.

Last week I went back to my hometown to help lay a great man to rest. His story is not mine to tell, although you can read it here if you do want to know it.

Funeral weekends are nothing if not an occasion to look back at the past. In the house of grief tales are told that rekindle and enliven the memories of the living. And I am fascinated by the layers of perspective and difference and detail that these memories take on when so many people share them. In the tumult of confused shouts and laughter and corrections there is truth, somewhere. This weekend I was even treated to a reminder of a family story I had been deeply involved in, one that had fled my memory for thirteen or fourteen years until someone else began telling it. Memory is a fragile thing, but rarely is it stronger than in the wake of a death, when it feels desperately important to get the stories told and the details right.

During a break in the flurry of mourning activities I walked the quiet, snowy streets of my childhood under a pinedark sky of silhouettes and streetlights. A few blocks from home a lot sits vacant, as it has my whole life. For many years this lot was our proving ground, a place for those children’s games during which far more is decided than a winner and a loser. Nameless games of our own devising, sometimes, although usually it was football or wiffleball. One summer I was the home run king of the place, finding a rhythm and confidence in my swing that I have never felt before or since.

Back home, out of the snow, familiar objects emerged as I sifted through the drawers and boxes in the rooms I used to haunt. A nightlight from my preschool, Gingerbread House, shaped like the eponymous structure. A letter mailed from South Korea written by my second grade best friend, whom I haven’t seen since, promising that we would remain friends forever even though he had moved across the world. A note from my sixth grade best friend in an envelope marked TOP SECRET proposing an idea for a new comic book we would write together. Jim Harrison once wrote that there is a clarity to childhood because the attention you pay to what you are doing is total. I think that’s true, but I also think there’s a bittersweetness to it, when you realize that paying total attention to whatever struck your fancy on a given day as a kid meant neglecting something else. I’m not sure I ever wrote back to either of them, although I hope I did.

In the backyard of my mom’s house is a red spruce that started as a tiny seedling I was given to plant as part of a first grade project. Twenty-six years later it is taller than any tree in the surrounding yards. English ivy from one of those yards choked the tree near death a few years ago, and while its branches are still mostly bare in the bottom half it’s thriving once again. It feels like an old friend, one I’ve known for as long as I’ve had memories.

No one can see the future and I’m as surprised as anyone that I can get emotional about something sent home on a whim when I was six. Mostly it makes me grateful to have grown up in a family that took those things seriously: the red spruce in the yard, the crayfish that came home from fifth grade science that lived for two long years in a plastic tub in the drawing room. All the childhood notes and letters carefully preserved just in case someday someone cared to look back at them. When you make space for care and wonder in your life you open up all kinds of possibilities that you couldn’t have predicted. When you do that same thing for your kids, well—it seems like it gives them a good shot to turn out alright.

Maybe that’s what we’re meant to take from these grieving times, when memory floods back into being. Maybe that’s how we’re meant to go about doing all of this.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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