Tonight, my daughter and I went to my parents' house after we ate dinner. It was early evening and a little cooler than it had been the past few weeks. We walked into the backyard so she could see my dad's dog in his pen and then she went to where my mom has (creepily) buried her three cats who have passed away. A few weeks ago a mole had started tracking through their backyard and the damn thing dug its way right through where my mom's cat, Hope, had been buried. It was fitting, I guess, that the mole had chosen to dig its way through Hope's grave since Hope was an absolute freak. She was the kind of cat whose eyes were ALWAYS huge. It's like she was on a constant hunt; like her adrenal glands were incessantly active. She could never sit still and none (I mean none) of my mom's other four (yes, I said four) cats could stand her. She was a crazy bitch and everybody knew it. It was fitting that an underground rodent chose to ravage the grave of the feline black sheep of the family. It's like nature knew that no one would really give a shit about Hope's grave...except for my daughter, Jordan. Every cat is redeemable in Jordan's eyes. She is the infinite giver of grace to neurotic animals. It bothered her greatly that Hope's grave had been defamed. She began to trace the track of the mole and finally started to imitate it and imagine how it would burrow its way through another yard. She led me to my parents' neighbor's house that has since been sold to the hospital and is currently vacant. Once she hit the carport, she made a quick right to where a concrete walkway led through a backyard, past a clothesline, and to the back fence that connected the backyard with another backyard. I realized, as I followed Jordan on the walk, that I hadn't set foot in this backyard since I was young. I tried to remember exactly how old I was and I could only land myself in a range between nine and eleven, which turns out to be about twenty-one years ago.
For my entire childhood, that house belonged to the Oakley sisters. They were two retired school teachers who never married and, from what I remember, were pretty different from each other. Their names were Faye and Louise. Once, Faye completely acted like a snitch and told my mom I was saying the word "butt" when, in fact, I couldn't say my "r's" and was simply trying to tell her about "Butt and Ernie" from Sesame Street. Suffice to say, Faye was actually the nice one. Or maybe in my memory she's the nice one because her face was more round than Louise's and her hair was a little whiter than Louise's salt and pepper, oily locks. Louise's face was long and thin, like any picture of a witch I had seen on movies or in books. Faye looked more like the fairy god-mother from those same stories. They would let me ride my bicycle in their driveway and let me play ball in their part of the yard that joined ours. They would cook cabbage and bring me some to eat, which I did because I didn't know any better. I was the only child on a street where the average age of its occupants was close to 60 and it was great. Any attention that these residents couldn't give their own grandchildren, they thrust on me.
As I followed Jordan down that path to the back gate, I saw the house I grew up from a perspective that I hadn't seen it from in twenty years. If you time it just right and every sensory effect lines up perfectly, you can almost trick your mind into believing that you're where you were when you burned this sensation in your brain. Many people call this deja vu, but that's a subconcious experience where your mind is tricking you. In this case, I was tricking my mind. It's the closest to time travel that I'll ever get and I felt like I did twenty years ago...just for a moment. The sight of my daughter to my left quickly brought me back and we made our way to the back fence. I showed her where my friend, Richard, lived. I showed the yard of my Spanish teacher that I used to mow. Directly behind my house, I showed her the first house where I lived from the time I was six months old until I was six years old. I also realized that I had never taken Jordan to that street and let her walk down it just the way I did when I was her age.
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| 27 Waverly Drive |
We made our way to Waverly Drive and as soon as I stepped on it and we began to walk, I knew it wouldn't be hard to deceive my mind and I knew a flood of inconsequential memories would start to pepper my brain. We walked under a tree where I used to ride my bike. I saw the old basketball goal at my friend's house and remembered the games we would play on a cold, December day and the feeling of trying to shoot a ball with three layers of clothes weighing you down. We stopped in front of my old house and I could see the tree where I made a spaceship out of an old refergirator box and I painted it blue. The realization of that memory took me by surprise because I had forgotten it happened. I saw where the willow tree used to be and I remembered that I played with my He-Man toys under that tree one Saturday. My thoughts took me into the house where the layout slowly came into focus and I could see that house as it used to be.
I realized how important it is to be grounded in something, to be able to pull your past back to your present. It's nice to go back to who you used to be sometimes. As I watched Jordan walk down my old street and in front of my old house, I found myself hoping that she has strong experiences and memories that she can call upon one day. I also prayed that she wouldn't be as connected to her past as I seem to be. I hope she has the wisdom to appreciate what helped shape her, but the strength to not let those things hold her in their nostalgic web. I hope she has the ability trick her mind sometimes into thinking she's somehwere else, but the maturity to know that those things are gone and what lies ahead is far more important than those things that are in the ground.
