Memory

Memory


They don't teach you how to watch the slow decline,
the slow unwinding,
the slow decay of a clock that's been turned on,
wound,
and run for sixty,
seventy,
or even eighty years.
It's as if you wake up,
and your body just can't do what it once did.

At the time, you tell yourself,
it doesn't really matter.
You never really wanted to climb that mountain,
run that far,
or reach for the edge like you once thought you did.
Life is more than just exploring possibilities,
its about learning the limits of your own desires.
So you settle into a life that seems .....
settle into a life because it feels...
and now wake up at night wondering
why is my brain doing this?
What if the process
wasn't just watching your body,
adjusting to the slow decay?
What if the watcher couldn't step back and watch anymore?

At my grandmother's last Thanksgiving,
I could barely talk to her.
She'd always been a hard woman,
demanding so much
and making me feel as if every mistake was somehow evidence of my ultimate shortcomings.
I'd watched more of her independence slip away
until she talked in incoherent sentences around a dinner table
as I poured the Pinot Noir into small goblets.
As a small child, she'd terrorized me...
checking the bathroom to make sure I'd lit a match,
had a BM,
was treating my own mother with the respect she deserved.
So it came as no surprise that when she passed,
I couldn't, wouldn't attend the funeral.
I didn't want to remember her fondly.
But now, upon watching my own father fight the slow decay,
the slow unwinding of his own clock
I remember her frailness,
her insistence on doing things her way
as I helped her out of the car,
took her arm as she moved up stairs.
She knew what it was like getting old.

Yet when her mind started playing tricks,
digging through old memories and making her relive them,
I wasn't big enough to show some compassion.
Sometimes the memories you carry
don't go away.
Sometimes the memories you want to forget
push you in ways
that seem hard
relentless,
like some litigator across from a table
is looking after his client
and really has no interest in you.

What happens when your brain decays?
What happens when you are surprised by the key in your pocket
and don't know how it got there?
What happens when the memories start surfacing
and aren't just quaint stories you tell around dinner tables
but become phrases, bits of experience that aren't digested
but come up like a meal that's been eaten
but still holds onto its shape?

Do you rest easy with your brain slowing down?
Do you rest easy with some label,
some disease,
some dysfunction that makes life a perpetual surprise?
Do you even know what resting easy is anymore?

Getting old scares me.
Its not dying,
yet I'm not entirely sure that when you notice its happening,
its really living anymore.
Yet the notion of fighting
what is inevitable isn't exactly pointless,
but doesn't seem entirely brave either.

April 27, 2010

Lakewood

Lakewood

Brown hair,
cut short,
flipped up like a wave rising to crest.
ice blue eyes that hinted at a story that may never be told.
You try to hold onto images
that have disappeared into folds of brain tissue,
deep crevices of memory
that lose its connection
like a hiking trail that gradually becomes part of a hillside landscape
winds down to the bottom.
From above, its hard to believe that you could make it,
could navigate the loose rock and scree
winding back and forth
to find yourself staring
at suburban Lakewood,
green lawns,
middle school kids playing ball in dead-end cul-de-sacs,
and high school kids disappearing in back doors,
running for phones
that are still wired to walls,
televisions that dominate one room,
notes scrawled on papers and left on refrigerator doors,
covered plates,
a list of chores,
frozen vegetables moved into a sink.

When you finally wake up to the possibility of sex,
you forgive the shortcomings you could so easily spot
when she was with someone else.
Suddenly those traits become quaint,
something you desire
as you try and make excuses for being alone,
getting your best friend to leave without telling him to.
You're finally awake to the subtlety of language,
the gentle nudge of a word,
a look in your eyes to his.
Dude, I'm working on this,
you say.
Can't you walk home for once?

It doesn't occur to you that she may be damaged,
not damaged as in something left out too long,
but damaged as in dropped,
beaten,
kicked
by a father
who hangs on the periphery of the whole scenario
like Chekhov's shotgun above the mantle piece.
At some point, it better be used,
but you hope this isn't that scene,
maybe even that act
and at best maybe you're bit player
who doesn't care about the number of scenes that he's in?

Would you know what to say if you saw her?
Would you try and say that you aren't the same person?
That person seems familiar
but you are unable to come to the same conclusions,
and wonder how this lead to that,
and how rationalization is funny thing
and how it only has to make sense for just a few minutes.
And it does.
It does and suddenly you're indelibly linked to her
though she may not see it that way.
She's humming a different tune,
seeing the world,
the chance at being a grown up,
desired and in control
when so much of what happens is out of it.

She wanted control
and you wanted intimacy.
She'd dish out the intimacy like a tithing widow at a lifelong church.
And you'd lend her your ear,
laugh at her jokes,
make her feel alive like dreams.

Months later,
you no longer believed the rationalizations,
no longer could listen for hours on end
and wanted nothing more than to listen to music,
escape the craziness,
maladjustment,
dysfunctionality
of anything less than a perfectly manicured lawn,
a pair of waxed cars,
fathers that come home at exactly five thirty
and tables set for four.

April 5, 2010