remembering
Uncle Babe died a couple weeks ago but it seems like I’m just now feeling it. It's been a long, overdue time coming so it would seem "rational" that I'd only be relieved the suffering is over. I think it took a while to hit because the loss has been there for a long time already but with a distant sadness. It started while they were still living in 401 Douglass, but it was when they moved out that all of what I knew of as Uncle Babe really started to vanish. He and his 9 siblings were born and raised in that house. He lived in it his entire adult life. Now someone completely disconnected from over a century of a family’s history lives there, and almost all of that history is lost. How can that be?
I feel like I can remember every detail of that house. The thick white banister up the stairs and on the landing that I dangerously thrilled to lean on just a little to feel when it would start to give. My aunt’s bedroom, full of clothes and pretty boxes of jewelry that I would ask to pore through every visit. Garfield and She-Ra Princess of Power sleeping bags laid on the floor for Carl and me next to my parents’ bed. The picture of Uncle Babe with his graduating high school class on the wall. The washer and drying stuffed into the small kitchen. The almost vertical and terribly narrow steps down to a basement I old ventured in twice. It was full of my uncle’s masonry tools. The bathroom sink downstairs with a hot water faucet and a cold water faucet, so that you never really had comfortable water. The back porch, with the triangle shelf where a bucket of peanuts sat so he could feed the chipmunks, who would come and reach their paws out to take the peanut from his fingers. The smooth crease of the patched cement on the sidewalk down the hill by the house. His little city garden, full of tomatoes. Lounging lawn chairs made of woven plastic, the luxury of which in my child’s mind I could only dream of at home. Petunias planted atop the terraced stone wall. The porch in summer, with a small radio for the ball game, magazines and newspapers I wasn’t yet interested in, and the smell of old but clean furniture. Eric got to sleep out on the porch by himself, and I remember laying awake in my sleeping bag upstairs, listening to my parents snoring and wondering what it must be like to be that grown up. The front door, with three small, scalloped green glass windows. The steep front steps with the steel railing painted green, the concrete painted green. How I loved sliding down that concrete to the bottom of the steps! Figurines of owls, dogs, nuns on the wall, pictures of our family next to them. Milkshakes in the summer, made by a doting aunt because she knew my mother didn't like the fuss of the blender. A TV with cable, imagine! Herby games with my family that I avoided when my uncle was playing, because his seriousness when he played cards made me shy and nervous. Walking by his chair and hearing him ask me, “What kind of trouble is my little imp getting into?” His characterization of me as a mischievous imp is a piece of identity I have carried with me into my adult life.
Sometimes I wish I could close my eyes and drift back into my small child body, and experience those moments again. Some of my best and most vivid memories are of that house with my aunt and uncle. His death feels like a resounding, closing thud on that part of my life. And while there will certainly be more amazing times and experiences for the rest of us, those times are lodged in memory, only as firmly as a memory can ever be. I can almost see it, almost smell it, almost taste it, almost hear it…but not quite. And with gaps. Remembering is really a process re-membering, putting items back into a picture that has been taken apart by time. You put pieces back together again as best as you can, but they never fit quite like they did the first time around.
To slip back into those moments and relive them again…it’s an unconscious wish that a significant death firmly tells your daydreamy heart can never be granted. It sounds silly, irrational and so embarrassingly obvious when written down. It just seems like the heart can keep things alive--sometimes without you knowing it!--that really aren't there any more. It's a hell of a trick to figure out how and when to let the bad ones go, and the heart's propensity to hold on is frequently derided. You know...all the "you have to live in the now" speeches. But there's a middle ground; tonight I love the heart's ability for little resurrection trips down memory lane to bring back someone I miss when I can't go back to be with them again one more time.
