Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I store my memories externally, in photos, belongings purchased during special times, gifts, books I once read or taught from, poems, and sometimes journals. One year I journaled on pages that I first painted, the colors and uneven texture of thickly painted paper eliciting words and phrases that had not emerged on crisp white sheets. Friends also hold remembrances for me, what I call side-car memories, since in them I’m playing some part in the larger memory of their experience, not my perspective, but without even these, I’d have huge swaths of blank personal timeline.
 

I found the painted journal today, as I was making my way gingerly through items in my garage. I saw the spiral binding back of it, but didn’t have the heart to open it up. I’d already seen plenty of water- and mold-damaged and unsalvageable books, sitting dormant in the garage for nearly a decade, accumulating not only spiders, living and dead, desiccated flies and wasps, pellets and remains and webs, but also a permanent odor that permeates these objects, clings to my hair when I dare to enter the living breathing ecosystem that has sprouted knobby fungi as hard as tree mushrooms on the wooden frames of posters and artwork that once graced my walls. It’s a terrarium, really, host to all manner of things I don’t want to know about, but at the time I moved in, I mistakenly thought it was a garage, the place where all good suburbanites store valuables that don’t currently fit in the main house.

 

Now, eight years later, a mere four years after deciding to tackle the garage, I have begun.

 

Most of the boxes hold books. Or things that were once books. I picked my way through this literary graveyard, the misshapen tomes, pages darkened by age yet edged white with mold and mildew, sunken book covers packed improperly before the moisture worked its way through the once heavy stock covers, spines no longer adhering to pages. Books, to a bookish girl, hold more than mere story or poetry; they hold the memory of when and who I was when I read it, the me that was alive when I touched those pages, the me into which the words and imagery landed, the me I was when I packed them into boxes. With nose scrunched in disgust, I looked at every title before throwing them out.

 

I found the wedding crystal from my grandmother, the remainder of the delicate wine and water goblets that don’t fit in my kitchen cabinets. I hope the contents are intact, but I’m not brave enough to look. I tried not to attend to sound when I moved them, careful not to notice the tiniest rustle as I moved them out of the way to continue my search. Grandma Florence wasn’t a delicate woman, but she denied me nothing. So when I registered for these elegant goblets, in an early bridal haze of imagining dinner parties for 12 of who would be our closest, most sophisticated friends, she bought them. Not once was she at my table to enjoy them, as I was already living out west. I’d give anything to sit with her at any table, our places set with a cribbage board and the daily Sentinel crossword puzzle, tap water in clunky juice glasses, the thick stemless glassware suiting her beefy hands and sturdy frame. Oh, the shame of what we once think we can’t live without.

 

Underneath heavy boxes of professional journals, training videotapes and course syllabi, I found boxes marked with the warning, “Fragile,” in my Mom’s telltale script, written over 30 years ago when she first boxed up a set of china I bought and shipped home to my parents when I was a foreign student in London. The boxes, which should have never been required to hold up the heavier boxes, are now soggy and crumpled, no longer holding any geometric form. Yet inside is the Wedgwood bone china with a delicate floral pattern in pastel orange and green and blue and yellow, soft and delicate colors that, I dare say, I don’t really like, a pattern that never matched any version of my life. I bought it when I was 20 years old. I knew nothing of china – I was a college junior who had lived only two years outside of my parents’ home, and what they called a dorm, but really was a warehouse of undergraduate coeds. There is no place in a room the size of a bunk bed and two desks to put any kitchenware, let alone a complete dinner and tea service, plus serving pieces, for twelve. An impulse buy, I guess you’d call it, but what else should I have bought when touring the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire? The Wedgewood set has lived most of my adult life in these boxes, and soon I will have to decide if I have it in me to open them up, assess each piece, then re-box them and move them into the main area of the garage which has yet to sprout fungus. Or leave them be, as it’s ever more clear that I live in the story of things, and the story might be best preserved by moving the soggy sunken boxes to a dry spot off the garage floor and stepping ever so quietly away.

 

A car seat, two booster seats, summer fans, my son’s first bike, paint cans, gardening tools, folding chairs, a slightly warped black time machine booth we made for my son’s 8th birthday, plywood spray-painted black then decorated with silver swirls and dials and buttons so that when the kids pressed them, they could announce whatever time they wished to travel to, enter the time machine, and emerge, transformed. It was the year of the rocket cake, the one and only year I attempted to make a cake that required assembly, slicing off corners from a rectangular home-baked cake and then frosting the final shape so that none of the seams showed. My sister-in-law once made a blue forest cake with mountains and trees, even a little stream, so when I went online to find pictures and instructions to make a cake in the shape of a rocket, I was convinced I had what was needed to pull it off. I didn’t. Eight-year-olds are a forgiving bunch, without having seen too many other rocket cakes for comparison, who happily focus on the main feature of birthday cake, which is that it gets sliced into giant squares and plopped onto themed paper plates and devoured, so in that way, the cake was a total success. So far, the hot-house environment of the garage hasn’t diminished the time machine’s magic, even if it can no longer stand upright on its own. It still works – I was transported back in time, to the cake, the party, my vision of my recently-deceased Dad collecting “time travel tickets” from the kids. It’ll stay in the garage no matter what species it sprouts.

 

I stop when I encounter more boxes marked photos. I’d thought they had all been safely moved into the house a few years ago when it was clear the garage reforestation process could not be stopped. Perhaps these older photos, which predate every memory of life in this house, were kept here for a reason, not that I could recall it now. There’s no box marked “Moving Day Thought-Processes” to help me remember. If I leave them here, the images they hold will surely fade. Better to imagine my memories are preserved, even if not in my head, than to imagine the alternative – that I will never see again the faces of the sun-tanned girls I bunked with at Camp Harand for five consecutive summers.

 

These summers were brought back to me in a weird twist of fate the other night, sitting on the bleachers in my son’s high school gym on a welcome-new-student night, the marching band playing their loving hearts out to all manner of brassy and overloud songs, ending with a rousing rendition of the school’s fight song, which, in a weird twist of fate, is based on the same Notre Dame fight song as my former Camp Harand song. For the next 4 years, he’ll be urging the Ballard Beavers to “Go! Fight! Win!” and I’ll be singing, “We are Haranders/We are the best/Working and playing/Above all the rest./Our initials stand for joy/We are Haranders!/ La la la la la la la/ H is for happiness/A – appetite/R is rambunctious/A -always right/N and D nutritious diet/We are Haranders!” If I’m feeling particularly sassy one day, I’ll substitute “nutritious dog food” as we did back in Elkhart Lake, and I hope it won’t disturb too many Beaver fans.

 

I guess some memories are lodged internally.