Memory

One of the ideas that I hope to advance with my writing is that of meaning.  How humans assign meaning to things.  My friend, Marion, tells me that I have an unusually good memory.  I don’t know if that's necessarily true.  I don’t have any way of objectively comparing my memory to those of… well, anyone else.  

Back around 1977 or so, I stumbled upon NPR (National Public Radio).  I was in high school.  At night when I retreated to my bedroom, I would listen to the news and other programs, intrigued by the content and discussion of current affairs.  Unlike other media, NPR opened a door into a broader, more adult world than was readily available in my little hometown of Flat Rock, Michigan.  And nobody else I knew knew anything about it.  Which definitely added a sort of clandestine intrigue to the whole thing.

When I moved to central Kentucky in 1979 to attend college I eventually reconnected with WBKU out of the University of Kentucky.  Now, this ages me; because today that station uses the call letters WUKY--which makes more sense.  Over the years, except for the times when I have lived overseas, I have anchored my home against one or more NPR stations. 

Over the years the shows have changed…farewell to The Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, St. Paul Sunday Morning…  And depending on where I’ve lived, I have also had to make adjustments.  For example, I can’t tell you how challenging it was after moving to DC not to end my weekends on Sunday evenings like this with Hearts of Space’s ambient “space” music’s gentle, calming soundscape. 

But new programs have also popped up.  Tiny Desk Radio, It’s Been A Minute (though Sam Cedar’s departure really tanked that one for me), and Wild Card with Michelle Martin.  The later is my draw-string to cinch up the idea that I first began with.  Wild Card is a 30 minute interview program wherein guests answer questions over a series of rounds.  Each Round has a theme.  Each theme has three unique and very different questions.  The guest chooses 1, 2, or 3--and then Michelle pulls that card to continue the interview. 

The questions are so amazing.  The responses are often insightful, intriguing, even inspiring.  I’ve been touched to the heart by interviews with guests like Matthew McConaughey, Brandi Carlyle, Brené Brown, and most recently Ocean Vuong.  No matter the question chosen, every guest is given the same final challenge: “Think of a time, a moment in your life, that you would like to return to.  You can’t change a thing about it.  You can be in that moment again.  What would it be?”

That is the question I will answer here.  Every time I listen to an episode, I end up here in my own mind.  It is the closest thing I have to anchor myself to any notion of a god at all--and I am fully content to call myself an atheist through and through.  So I attach no religious meaning to this memory; however, “spiritual” it might seem to be.

I grew up, as mentioned earlier, in a small town in extreme southeastern Michigan.  I lived in a three bedroom house built in a levittown-esque subdivision in Flat Rock: a town with just over 4,000 residents.  All the homes in my unchristened neighborhood were placed on lots of about the same size.  Chain-link fences defined everyone’s backyards.  Most homes had driveways, some (like mine) garages.  All favored the same initial floor plans with exterior elements determined by the initial purchaser.  I didn’t need to go into my neighbors home to know where the bathroom was located. 

What made each house different often had to do with how the new owner chose to landscape their yards.  My father--before I was born, but right after our home was built (1957), hiked up on a mountain in western Maryland near where he grew up and dug up a pair of spruce saplings.  These were planted like breasts equally distant from the center of the front yard where their proximity allowed them to flourish jointly.  The backyard was focused by the presence of a 2 car garage.  Against the back fence he planted a crab apple tree, and in the far corner a Lilac bush that was taken from a clipping from a bush that grew in my mother’s childhood home in Oklahoma. 

Of all of the plantings, the crab apple grew the most vigorously.  We’ve all seen crab apples.  Mid-range ornamental trees that fill the air with their sweet aroma in May and produce tiny, bitter fruit in July/August.  By the time I was seven, the trees’ upper branches were nearly tickling the eclectic lines that ran on poles down the center of all the abutting backyards from my block (Aspen Drive) and the adjacent one (Red Cedar Street) behind my home.  Beneath the tree, my father had built a large sandbox.  When I was 9, we made a tree house in the lower limbs together using an old door frame and plywood. 

By then I had learned how to climb even further up into the upper most branches of the tree.  A tree that had become a friend.  In one particular place, perilous close to the electricity lines, the branches of three boughs came together to form a sort of “cup”.  A place where a little wiry boy could plant his skinny butt down without obstruction and lean back feeling the safety of many fingers of limbs supporting his shoulders, neck, and head as he stared into the blue sky watching the clouds passing by.  

That’s the first place where I would go again.