All the Way Here

I’m cozied up on Pearl’s piano teacher’s couch in her living room, while in the studio Pearl plays “Stand by Me” over and over.

On Sunday, I took a long walk on the rail trail. At one point, that song rose up through the trees; at first, I couldn’t identify its origin and felt I was in a movie with a sudden soundtrack in the background. Then the mystery lifted as I realize the Amherst College women’s soccer team was out warming up, with music blaring over the adjacent fields. Still, that moment was kind of magical, and I’ll take magic in whatever form it chooses to take, however fleetingly.

I’ve been in this room only after piano recitals. I associate it with cookies and pleasant small talk and other parents. Some small chimes hang from the fireplace mantel, where some houseplants and a menorah of metal and stone sit amidst family photos and line drawings of dogs. It’s homey and unpretentious, the space of an artist. A dozen books in small piles stretch across the coffee table, and I’m warm under what looks to be a handmade blanket the color of sea glass.

I grew up in a house like this, filled with objects and gifts from various travels and international visitors and guests.

My own home, by contrast, is smaller, having pared down post-divorce, having moved a few times over the past seven years, having given away or sold so many of the objects that might otherwise fill our rooms. I used to be more of a pack rat, though if you saw inside the two drawers of my night stand, you might raise an eyebrow at the use of the past tense. There, you’d find a cigar box containing old postcards and photos, among other things.

I recently read In the Country of Women, a memoir by Susan Straight. A Facebook friend who happens to be a school librarian suggested it to me, and I decided to take her up on the recommendation. I’m glad I did; it’s a tour de force of memory, a story of family and place writ large across centuries and continents. But there is one passage in particular near the very end of the book that transfixed me. I returned the book to the library already, or I’d share the entire paragraph.

In it, she asks herself the question: What doesn’t burn? She asks this literally, and proceeds to answer herself. In the end, the only thing she can come up with that doesn’t burn is memory.

Whew. That will stay with me.

And yet — memory is so fallible. So while it may not burn, it certainly can morph. It lives in the body. It can be triggered by the most mundane, unexpected thing, like sitting in a room that feels viscerally familiar, or catching a whiff of something as you walk down the street. You might turn back, trying to see the origins of this scent, unable to grasp it. You might have little flashes, like the ones that come from dreams sometime when you’re in the middle of some task — a work meeting, or doing the dishes.

Memory is that most elusive of creatures, part mythical, like the music that comes seemingly out of nowhere. It may be soothing and it may be ferocious. It may be of little import or of terrible consequence.

I glance to my left and see a horse in mid-gallop, carved from dark wood, on the side table. I remember my middle sister’s collection of horses. Did we play with them together?

I often feel I remember very little of my childhood. Today in therapy, I recalled slipping notes under my parents’ bedroom door, a habit that began when I was maybe eight or nine.

Now Pearl’s teacher is playing “You Take the A Train” and I glance at the clock. It’s been about 15 minutes since I sat down to write. I’m not really getting anywhere, but that’s ok with me. I didn’t set out with a destination in mind, which means I’ve neither missed the mark nor wasted time. I set out only to practice, to arrive here in this space with its little birds in the chandelier and the peacock feathers there in the corner, only to write into the present moment of being here during my son’s lesson.

Why bother writing if you’re not writing something? It’s a fair question.

And what I would say in response is this: Because if you only write when you have a “something” you are writing, it’s going to be a whole lot harder than if you’ve been also writing with no goal, no outcome, no result worth writing home about (see what I did there?).

A Mason jar with drooping daisies, I’m guessing the last from her garden. It was a warm October, and the flowers are only just now succumbing to the colder coming days. On the way here, the light was so beautiful, so warm and deep, that I almost pulled over. We would’ve been late, though that hasn’t always stopped me from stopping for beauty.

Now it’s 4:57pm, the slightest hint of color draining from the sky behind bare branches. November is all the way here. And I can say with some confidence that I am, too.