Thursday, August 25, 2005

Cloudy Deep Down (Or, What I Wanted to be the Intro)


I barely remember kindergarten. I know what the school looked like, but probably from seeing it in its later years. I do remember how pretty Miss Marbrick looked one day in a pink sweater (the kind with the long silky hairs streaming off it) and something about kool aid at Tanglewood Park. I remember walking to school with Kenny Henslee on the first day of first grade. Kenny was my next to best friend and a second grader, so he knew the ropes. I remember the straight thunder of my dad’s arm as he raised a bowling ball behind him, and the easy strut he made after a strike. I remember how good the round steak smelled as Mom fried it for dinner, but not how her hair was so long she could tie it in a knot behind her. Now that she is seventy-four and has her mostly white hair that long again, I look at her and wonder. If it were black, and her skin still taut and strong, would she be the woman that bore me... I remember the night before my oldest sister left for Honduras. I was nine, and we stayed up all night talking on her blue bed. I spoke at my father’s funeral, but don’t remember it...just a foggy notion of looking out, and seeing Eric Aulbach there and knowing everything was going to be ok. I remember seeing Angie Britton’s yellow underpants in second grade. And, the same year, watching Stacie Malinsky pulling books out of her desk without even having to look. Now that was love.
I want this to be a place of memory. Of then and now again. To know what we know, even if we don’t know why we know it. A place to dream a little, to laugh and cry and love a little. To remember what has gone before. What has brought us willy nilly to this second. A place to wonder why, and to decide that it may not even matter.