The Floating World

How would you like to read these letters, I wonder? In what order best to arrange them? That’s a thing about memories: they’re laid down in a nearly continuous, linear sequence, the wake of time’s arrow, but they can be reviewed in any which order or fashion, and with every review of even one of them, that one mutates a little, and all the others mutate a little around it.  

You could for instance, start here. Do you remember the first time your mother and I took you to an aquarium? It was for your fifth birthday and you’d been asking to go to the aquarium for a while, I can’t remember exactly why. You were interested in sea creatures of course, but you had always been interested in creatures of all sorts, most especially bugs, lizards, butterflies, and moths. We had also taken you to the zoo and to at least one lepidopterarium but those were when you were a toddler, so even if you’ve seen a picture or two, I doubt there are any memories there for you. But you may recall your fifth birthday and the Las Vegas aquarium at Mandalay Bay. So let’s start there for today.
 
I could recount the trip in sequence, but that’s an order my sense of calendrical time imposes on it in retrospect. (I wonder about the flight of that arrow sometimes.) If you remember it anything like the way that I remember events of my early childhood, I’ll wager you have a few vivid flashes surrounded by dim illumination.
 
Do you remember the ray tank, the “touching pool,” now a staple at aquariums? You perched intently on the rim of the pool, waiting for any chance to touch one of the gliding rays. You moved your position several times, delighted in every touch, and you came back for a second round before we left. You also charmed the guide overseeing the tank, conversing with her about the rays and what they liked, but I doubt that you’d remember that. That’s the sort of memory more cherished by a parent.
 
Or maybe you remember the giant octopus, which had sprawled out fully splayed against a vertical wall of glass. You stood for minutes mesmerized by that. Or perhaps the slow stroll through the tunnel of sharks? The cylinder of moon jellies floating like ghosts? I don’t remember any exhibit that didn’t hold you under a spell. I wonder now, did it feel like a dream for you? Does it seem like a dream to you now?  Those dark but glowing rooms lined with glass walls, the creatures swimming past, around, and sometimes over you. You loved it, that much I know. The year before we had done a big, neighborhood kids party for you with a woodland theme. Your mother went all out making things and it was a suburban blast. The year after, you had another sprawling birthday party at the house. But I think it was worth skipping the party that one year to spend the day, just the three of us, in “the deep blue underworld” you still sing about.
 
For a couple of years after that, I wanted to take you to an aquarium again. This past winter, I finally got the chance. I surprised you with a day trip, just us two this time, to the Living Planet Aquarium in Salt Lake, which proved to be more of a massive, interior hybrid of aquarium, butterfly house, aviary, and zoo.
 
My hunch is that, of the two visits, you remember the second better, simply because you were two years older, but also because we spent more time there and it was so much more diverse. In addition to two petting pools, a larger shark tunnel that also contained apparently shark-proof sea turtles, another giant octopus (this one working on its camouflage skills), and wildly colorful arrays of coral fish,  there were freshwater riparian and lacustrine exhibits with viewing stations above and below water. There was an otter exhibit, a snow leopard exhibit (which, oddly, barely interested you), and a rainforest exhibit with piranhas, electric eels, and sleepy sloths. We walked through a garden of Utah butterflies (well, you walked, and I rolled). The butterflies landed on our hands, the back of my wheelchair, and in your hair.
 
That was it, though. Nothing happened on either visit that would have counted as a significant event, other than the visit itself.  In the months since our second aquarium, every time we’ve done some sort of field trip together—park, zoo, natural history museum, planetarium—I’ve checked for your review. Nothing beats the aquarium. You’ve added marine biologist to your future career portfolio (along with actor, entomologist, and artist). But who knows? It may fade. I’d be curious now to know what events in my early childhood were the ones that my parents thought would stay with me. Probably few or none of those that actually did.  

And if you remember either or both of those aquarium trips at all, you’ll almost certainly remember something that I don’t. That’s the weirdest thing about memory world: thanks to language, we can share it, or seem to, at least part of it, and yet no two persons' memories of any single event align. So line up these letters however you like, along whatever timeline. Like all memories written or spoken, they’re phosphorescent creatures of their own, dependent on imagination, otherwise lost, floating along in the real or recreated dark.

Lullaby

When you were an infant, I used to sing you a pop song with the line in it, “I never thought about love when I thought about home.” I sang the song because another one of its lyrics expressed my, then otherwise secret, financial worries (“I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe”) but mainly because it was a slow song in a deep register that made my chest rumble when I sang, which helped you fall asleep as I held you. A strange lullaby, but effective.

I don’t believe I’ve thought as much as most folks have about either love or home. Wallace Stevens once mused that, “Life is an affair of people, not of things, and yet for me for me life has been an affair of things, and that is the problem.” Something like that has held for me as well, although perhaps neither people nor things have counted as much for me as they ought. Life for me has been an affair of changes. But then you were born, and the changes I attended to increasingly involved you. I thought about love more. I even thought a little about home.

I loved you on arrival, and we bonded in those early days more than a typical father and infant might have otherwise because you struggled with latching on to your mother’s breast your first week and then, once you did get the hang of it, you wore her out with multiple night feedings that always woke her up. When you were three months old, she developed full-blown, persistent insomnia that afflicted her, on and off, for years. She needed extra help from me.

As a consequence, you slept on my chest your first couple of weeks, and I often spent the small hours cradling you in a rocking chair in the moonlit cabin so that your mother could sleep, sometimes feeding you sugar water from my pinky fingertip. When you finally fed better, it became my task to rise with you just before dawn, after your last nursing, and take you out to the front room with me to change you and keep you company while your mother slept in for a while. When her insomnia became really bad, we tried treating it by having you sleep with me in another room occasionally. I bottle-fed you her expressed breast milk or a half-and-half mixture of breast milk plus formula whenever you woke hungry in the night.

I confess, I liked those nights. I didn’t sleep great, but I loved having your little bundle snoring softly beside me. From the time I first held you right after you were born, I have always found your mere presence comforting. Even now, when you sometimes clamber into my bed at four or five in the morning, thrashing and whispering, poking resentful me awake, I can’t bring myself to kick you out of the room completely. I like having you around, whether as companion or nuisance.

I think that’s how you became both love and home for me, even when you were being exhausting. It was also usually my task, the years when your mother and I still lived together, to be the first responder to any nightmares or cries in the night, in hopes of preserving her all-too-fragile sleep. I spent hours and hours in the dark beside your crib and, later, in a chair next to your bed, either soothing or crooning you back to sleep—or just waiting silently to be sure you really were truly back asleep. And, the majority of mornings, I got up with you or you woke to get up with me. Our lives rotated around each other and you were a steadily growing center of gravity for me.

But life is an affair of changes. There are the subtle, happy changes of growth that I took care to note—now you’re older, for instance, you sleep through the night almost all nights, mercifully, and you’re a more and more interesting person, conversationally. But there are also the unhappy changes of personal failures and a marriage disintegrating. Nowadays, I don’t get to spend as much time with you, and I don’t have a partner anymore to help me make a home for you when I’m with you. I worry that home and love may come apart for you.

I’m an old father who spent nearly half a century being someone who lived mostly alone and always without children. Busy watching the curious ways the world would alter itself around and within in me, I rarely meditated on home and future family. Once in a while, yes. From time to time, I hoped. I married. I tried. I went back to living alone. So it goes.

Now, thanks to more than seven years of being a father, thanks to you, I do often think about love when I think about home, and vice versa. And if I cannot always be there for you, I hope that you remember all of it wrapped together whenever you think about father and family, love and home.

Memories Are Also Dreams

The most dreamlike memories, I’ve found, are not necessarily the ones involving the dreamiest activities. I can’t see any unifying theme to those memories of mine that most feel like something I didn’t actually live, only dreamed. They cluster together in time, but they are neither the most dramatic nor most mysterious episodes of my life. Some more unusual adventures remain sharp-edged and hard in mind, tied to a local habitation and a date, but these moony memories may be of relatively ordinary activities that feel, now, dislocated somehow. Their defining feature is that I know I lived them but they still feel detached from the rest of my life around them. Often, I simply can’t place them, the where or when of them. You may be old enough by now to have memories like this of your own, although I’m thinking more of the memories from when I was grown. Almost all childhood memories feel weirdly dreamlike after enough time.

I was thinking of this the other day, driving through central Utah alone. There’s a town somewhere in the west of the state that I suddenly remembered driving through one afternoon and that I was trying to more clearly remember, but I couldn’t recall the exact details. It was small, scruffy, and well up in the mountains, and it felt like it was dying, with its boarded store fronts and sagging walls. But it was a pretty place as well, for all its melancholy, and it reminded me of other half-dead western towns I’d passed through in Nevada and the Dakotas. In fact, it could have been one of those, and I could be mistaken about it being in Utah at all. 

I have another floating memory of a day spent wandering around a community of cabins and vacation homes somewhere in the New England woods. It was late winter or early spring, raw and grey weather with piles of old snow in the shadows. I was a young man and accompanied by a girlfriend that day, but weirdly I can’t remember who. Was it Sylvia in 1991? Pam in 1982?  We were fantasizing together about owning one of those homes and pretending to pick one to buy. Why? I don’t know. I don’t remember the rest.

Then there was the time at twilight when I was traveling with my first wife, again in the New England countryside, looking for an inn for the night. It was early summer and the late, low light was green with a few gold spars through the trees, making us feel almost as if we were swimming underwater. We pulled up to a tavern with a motel, a low white building with a green-shingled roof almost melting into the trees, one neon beer sign glowing blue-and-gold in a dark picture window. And then? Nothing more that I can recall.

Perhaps there are themes to these, or at least correlated components. All of them, as I mentioned, are hard to place or date precisely, even though I have a minor gift for remembering exact or near-exact dates, and many of them come from times when I was traveling. And although nothing special happens in any of them, they all have an unreasonably haunting emotional aura attached to them. It’s probably that latter, emotive characteristic more than anything else that makes them feel like dreams. We tend to play up the weirdness of the crazy events in our dreams, and it’s true that sometimes in dreams we die or fly, but the intensity of dreams comes from the atmosphere of some powerful emotion clinging to what, recounted in daylight, is often an emotionally unexceptional scene.

And these memories can be multiple, like a stack of slides or similar pictures piled in a box in their frames. The sharper pictures can blur in mind when compiled with the fuzzier, unrelated snaps. That’s how a clear memory of mine, of being with your own six-year old self late last summer at the smoky lake has acquired a tinge of the unreal in just the several months since then.

You were playing in the water near the shore. There was no one else down at the bay that day. The summer neighbors from Vancouver and their granddaughter were away. The handsome mountains were fuzzed by a fine haze drifting in from fires far to the northwest. I swam out to the center of the bay and turned to look back at you. You gave me a wave. The waters were unusually clear, even for that pellucid lake, an effect perhaps exaggerated by the contrasting haze in the air. I looked down into the green deep, as I often do, then around at the quiet, empty surface.

My heart jumped like a fish when two spooky, half-dream memories surfaced simultaneously. One was a real memory of a fictional scene. I had watched a movie once—can’t remember the name, the actors, the plot, or exactly when—that had haunted me with a drowning scene. A man had been alone on a large, clear lake in the pines on a sunny summer day, in a rowboat, I think. Somehow he ended up in the water and, just before he drowned, a panorama of the lovely scene was shown from his point of view, head just above the waves. The view I was looking at, it seemed, was identical to his. There was, as I remembered it, as a sense of malice in the lake.

And then, or simultaneously, I also remembered visiting an eastern reservoir, perhaps in Pennsylvania or New York State, with my father during a cold spring. I was a young man. It was probably the last time I did any sort of fishing or camping trip with him. He told me about a town he used to visit on fishing trips with his father that was now drowned under that very reservoir. That memory, too, I felt overlapping, decades later, with this entirely different, British-Colombian lake. 

Now, all three of those dreamlike memories have stacked together for me: the movie in which the man was somehow seized by the lovely lake, my father telling me about the drowned town of his youth underneath us, and me suspended over the calm abyss on that hazy day, waving to you playing in the shallows and bobbing your blonde head. 

There are more, many more. An eerie encounter with a great, colorful heap of vegetables piled on an empty desert road at twilight, my car having just come up behind an overturned truck. An autumn graveyard in the Alleghenies where I thought surely I would find some meaningful name on a headstone because my lover had (literally) dreamed that I would. The free-floating memory of watching a thunderstorm’s slow approach from across a vast, flat valley. Those sorts of things, nothing really in common but the heavy, sometimes blissful sense of portent in them despite their insignificance as events, plus the detachment from any surrounding memories to anchor them.

I want to modify what I wrote earlier about almost all childhood memories feeling dreamlike after enough time. I should add that I suspect that’s also true of every adult memory, and real dreams are just our nightly rehearsal for the emotion-freighted years of increasingly distorted remembering we experience throughout our slow forgetting. Either that or all our episodic memories are squares and patches in a well-worn quilt we wrap around our tossing feelings, believing our warmth or chill is their fault.

Mischief and Alarms

Sometimes, I try to remember exactly what mischief I'd gotten up to, what secrets I'd already kept to myself by the time I was your age. Sometimes, it feels as though I were never your age. I have a few anecdotes I've retold so often that I've worn them soft as chamois, but events that seem perfectly ordinary to have involved me at five or six, at seven or eight, are weird to imagine happening to you. Surely, I was always older than you are, somehow. Surely.

The first neighborhood my family lived in, until I was almost eight, was a close-set street of single-family ranch homes with little yards, the kind that proliferated in suburbs all around the country during the mid-twentieth century, although not quite the sort of sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivision that became most common later. This was working middle-class, white America in the 1960s. Most of the houses had stay-at-home moms with multiple children living in them, and the prolonged neighborhood play sessions, particularly in the summer months, could tumble up and down the block.

The families whose kids I played with the most were the Howlands and the Klimbecks, whose houses were, respectively, directly across the street from and adjacent to ours. This may have been because I was the least mobile kid on the block and often couldn't leave the house at all. Roaming the neighborhood in a wheelchair was supremely difficult, as even the single-story houses had entry steps and narrow doors. I valued most the children, like Colleen Howland, who were content to hang out in our yard or house and play with me for hours, but occasionally I was upright and agile enough to join the golden summer horde that roamed from home to home. The Klimbecks and the Howlands counted several children apiece, and the ones nearest my age were all girls.

I was little, I was frail, and I was often the only boy. This made me something of a pet but also something of a target for the slightly older girls. During one game of hide-and-seek at the Howland's, when I was six, I burrowed into the clothes at the back of a bedroom closet, only to find myself trapped. I was discovered by a pair of eight year-old girls, who then stood shoulder-to-shoulder, barricading the door. One of them shone a cumbersome flashlight down on me in my nest. The other ordered me to pull down my pants or they wouldn't let me go. I pulled down my pants. The flashlight beam glared at my privates, and the two girls laughed. Then they ran off, while I scurried to hitch up my pants and get out of there before they came back. I was utterly perplexed and had no idea why they laughed. I don't remember feeling shame, but I remember feeling powerless.

Although my evangelical parents shunned any alcohol or tobacco, at least half the adults in the neighborhood smoked. Therefore, we children were often nabbing cigars and cigarettes, which we took into garages, basements, sheds, or bushes to play around and pose with, amusing each other. Sometimes, if we had also snatched matches, and we convinced ourselves, with much whispering, that it was safe, we would try to light up, and then pretend to smoke. We never inhaled, or at least I never did, just filling our mouths and competing to blow out circles, which none of us did well. I don't recall ever getting caught blowing smoke, although once I stood by mute while one of the girls from down the street got abruptly strapped by her mother for attempting a cigarette theft from a purse. Writing this now, it strikes me that, although I remember most of my childhood fondly, nothing fixes a moment in the memory like a feeling of alarm.

My alarm was not always induced by other children or by adults; sometimes, my play was interrupted by the world. I was probably the only kid to break a leg playing in a sandbox, as well as the only one to find himself truly, helplessly petrified at the top of a backyard slide, too terrified to go down. I would not budge, convinced that I would shatter when I reached the ground, and one of the other kids had to run to find a mother for help. Eventually, one of the mothers arrived and lifted me down. It was something that I kept to myself, like being trapped by those girls with the flashlight or watching that friend get strapped.

When we moved to the new house in the swamp woods, with the little creek running alongside, there was a lot more outdoor room but many fewer kids and almost no girls in the neighborhood. The two boys I played with my first year there, when I was seven and eight, were much more adept at stealing cigarettes than the kids in my prior neighborhood had been, also beer, and they had a trick for disguising the telltale smells on their breath. It all depends on knowing your environment, and they were the indigenes as far as I was concerned.

First, we would steal a pack of Marlboros from John Schober's father, from the carton he always kept in the coat closet. Then we would filch a couple of bottles of beer from one of the cases in the garage of old man Grigolet, who forgot to shut his back door half the time. (The three of us were seven, eight, and ten.) Then, in the long summer twilight, we would slip down to the creek, where the trees crowded over us, to smoke, sip, and spit like Huck Finn, although I was the only one of us who yet knew anything about him.

After a while, when we knew we would need to be getting back to our houses soon, we would yank up fistfuls of onion grass from the swampy ground right beside us, and we would chew on them vigorously, even swallowing the slurry. At last, we would saunter off in our separate directions, green stems sticking jauntily from our teeth, an awful taste of raw onion in our mouths.

My mother used to sternly warn her children, in those years, that if we ever smoked, she would smell it on us instantly, and we would be sorely punished. But I would smirk to myself when she said so, knowing how many times already I had crept back from the woods, stinking more of mud and onion than anything else. If she wondered, she never asked.

When I think of that eight year-old's smirk now, I wonder what you might already have had cause to smirk or have felt alarm about. I probably don't want to know, but I do know that I don't know. I do.

The Drop-Off

By the time you are able to read and understand this composition, you likely will already know that the memories of families run shallow, the knowledge of history drops deep, and the scope of prehistory follows down to an abyss. Our sense of the time before us reminds me of the lake I have loved since before you were born, with its tiny fringe of rocky, shallow shelf, then the drop-off that you can swim over and stare down into, seeing how the underwater cliff crumbles down and away, then the real deep, the darkness that you can plumb, measure, and knowledgeably fathom but can’t begin to see through, can’t ever swim down to visit. I was fourteen when I first appreciated this.
 
I never felt starved for knowledge of my family. My mother and father told me plenty of stories about their childhoods and other family members. I knew three of my grandparents and many uncles and aunts. One afternoon at my paternal grandparents’ house, home from school for the holidays, I was talking to my grandfather’s brother, my great-uncle Jerry. He was telling me about his fascination with family history and his hobby of genealogy. He’d even taken a special trip to England once to try to find records that would connect William Jeffreys, his immigrant great-grandfather, more precisely to a longer lineage that he hoped would include a few nobles or at least a scandalous and historical Jeffreys or two.
 

I caught the bug, and with the benefit of a copy of Uncle Jerry’s family tree, some branches extending to nearly a dozen generations, I started constructing a tree of my own. I scored two early, easy coups to add to his work. On my mother’s side, a much-older cousin was also an amateur genealogist and could provide me with a handsome graft of several branches, again ten or twelve generations in extent. And poring through the stacks of a local library one day, I found a decades-old, published history of my paternal grandmother’s mother’s family, the Ryersons, who had been among the first Dutch settlers in what had long since become New York and New Jersey. That allowed me to tie the items my grandmother knew of her maternal ancestry directly into a larger story that included the first Dutch child born in America and stretched back to French Huguenots and Amsterdam burghers of the late sixteenth century.
 
With those three handsome, sprawling grafts spread out on my chart, all carefully hand-ruled and written as clearly as I could manage in my schoolboy print, I already had a bosky fan with several thick and leafy limbs reaching two to three centuries in places, decked at the tips with curious surnames I’d never heard before, like Trico and Gildersleeve. But now I needed to do some more original sleuthing, so I began, optimistically, by quizzing any living relatives in reach of me, either in person or by correspondence to last-known addresses my mother supplied me. The results were initially exciting but soon disappointing. I got no further than four or five generations, relying on the fly-leafs of old family bibles and living memory. Even at that, many of the links were uncertain, the dates of birth, death, and marriages often unknown or blurry.
 
Back at boarding school, I was taking Mr. Edwards’ required class in world history. On an evening when I was doing a bit of homework with my heavy textbook open to the Roman Republic, one of my dorm-mates  from down the hall popped in to my room with a piece of mail for me that had been mistakenly put in his box. It was from an elderly aunt on my mother’s side in northern New England, responding to a query of mine. In spidery Palmer script she wrote that one of the more unusual names on my cousin's tree, Sariph Secoida, my grandmother’s great-grandmother and therefore not very far removed but mysterious, had been a Senecan who had married into our otherwise mostly English-descended family. But she told me nothing of note about her, writing only that she faintly recalled her great-grandaunt as a quiet, old woman and “dark.”
 
I looked up from the lavender-scented letter and over at my open history textbook. For a moment, my head swam. Here I was scraping the surface of a few mute, nearly anonymous generations, trying to reconstruct a family history, and yet my head easily contained detailed information about those more famous humans going back for millenniums. I was dizzied both by the insignificance of my family to greater history and by the epochal, logarithmic difference in time scales between what I knew of general history and what I could learn of my family’s past. If I set the bare documentation aside and relied on family stories alone, we had, what, four generations of fuzzy dates and anecdotes to relay, five at the most? We were reasonably long-lived people, but go just a century or so deep, and the hand-me-down accounts abruptly ceased. If history was a ruin, our collective memory was only a garden compost heap already half gone to seed.
 
I never much expanded my genealogy chart after that, but for decades I carted it around with my belongings, more and more rarely unfolding its increasingly delicate creases. Somewhere along the line, probably a couple of years before you were born, I misplaced or lost it. The family members I interviewed for it are themselves all gone. 

These days, the world swarms with professional online services, genealogical and genetic combined, that I could pay to illuminate more of the shadowy recesses of our family tree. One of these days, I need to do that for you. At the moment, all the deep history I can tell you is that my Y-chromosome is from the most common male lineage in Western Europe, while my mtDNA haplotype appears to be Native American. You have, however, inherited neither of those.
 
But even if we do fill in our trees, you and I, and anchor them in the greater ruin of human history, the point still holds. These bits and bobs of memory that I’ve composed for you to read here, the scraps and anecdotes that my now-gone family members passed on to me, are tiny things. At the end of last summer, on our last day at the lake in early September, you wanted to try something daring on our final swim. You were six and you’d been practicing for months, dog-paddling and occasionally attempting a backstroke or freestyle, but you’d stuck to swimming in the shallows, horizontally along the shore. You’d never gone beyond where you could clearly see the bottom, not without wearing a life-jacket while I held onto you. You were often alarmed by the shadows of sunken logs and branches, the green-furred remnants of fallen trees.
 
“Papa,” you said, on the last day. “I'm ready to swim over the drop-off. I want you to swim close to me, but DON’T hold me, ok?”
 
So that’s what we did. It’s a startlingly short swim, if you strike out straight into that clear lake, to where the edge of the cliff appears underneath you and you feel a bit like you’re flying, as you float suspended over the rocks that tumble into darkness. You were afraid of trees and monsters in the lake’s depths, of ghosts from sunken ships, but you swam out anyway. For a few moments we paddled in place together, looking down, and I could feel the thrill and the fear of it for you, as well as my own thrill at your daring and my own fear I might have to rescue you. It was an empty afternoon at the woods’ edge, and  there wasn’t another soul around but us.
 
“Ok, Papa,” you said, popping your head back up, “That’s enough. Let’s swim back.” So we did. You were pleased with yourself, and I was proud of you. We were ready, then, to leave for the season. There’s no appreciating the warm, familiar shallows that you wade and play in until you’ve seen for yourself that cliff, until you've felt yourself small and suspended over the deep.