Hope Chest

Sometimes I wonder how long it will be until you can read these letters easily. And then I wonder when, or if, you will find them meaningful, emotionally and personally. When you were a few months old, I had no idea of the girl you’d be at four or five or six. Now you’re almost eight, and your personality appears as solid as the sunrise once the highest cliffs are cleared. But I still don’t know what that means. Nothing can tell me exactly the person you’ll become, nothing but the happening of it, the actual becoming. 

In a strange way, writing to a hoped-for future reader is like writing to a ghost, a vaporous ectoplasm comprised of memory and imagination. It would be easier to put down in words the things I hope for you than it is to guess how to best address you. Who knows how many years will have passed between, what our relationship will be or have been by then?

And what do I hope for you on this day that you get around to reading these sentences? What can I hope that isn’t simply salutations and cliches? To be sure, I hope you are happy and well. I hope you still love your old father, or the memory of him if he’s gone. I hope that the random accidents of life have not reshaped you too far from the person you are as I know you now. I love the person you are, and I’m happy for both of us that you have turned out to be exactly who you are. It seems almost impossibly fortunate to have fathered you.

I hope you have never been too altered by injuries invisible or visible. You know that I say this as a visible cripple myself. Whatever has gone on in your life since I composed this, I hope you are mostly glad. But I can’t know. I hope that if you do come to this with regrets, then I am around to remind you of the fallacy of all regret. Or of pride. You are not very much of a causal factor in who you become, none of us are, despite all the speeches about "consequences" you’ve been given by your elders since earliest childhood.

Or perhaps you have become someone who fiercely believes in causes and consequences yourself. Perhaps you are already a parent as well. Perhaps you have converted to some faith or another. Perhaps you have returned to the quietly stubborn evangelism of my sister, mother, aunts, and mother’s mother. Perhaps you have taken up the pioneer Mormon faith that your own mother’s mother left behind her. Heaven knows, you’ve spent enough of your formative years in deep Utah.

Or perhaps you are none of these things. Perhaps you are nothing I can imagine. I can’t bear to imagine you are nothing, although I know that’s one outcome out there in this forever uncertain universe of possibility. Children die, sometimes. It hurts my chest. It gives me a surge of burning dread just to write it down. I’ll not write it down again.

I will try to have mercy on myself, to imagine optimistically, to once more invoke our family motto, supra spem spero, and hope against hope. I imagine you now rather tall, taller than me to be sure, although probably not too strikingly taller than average. I imagine your blonde hair has darkened, as your mother’s did, to a honeyed wheat. I imagine you are sturdy and charming, a little wild, amusing, stoic, and not too concerned for your looks. (I'm composing hopes using who you are now, as I know you, and a few of my favorite traits of your female relations closest to me.)

I imagine that whatever shocks the world has thrown at you so far--there must needs be some, as any fool knows who sings--you’ve shrugged through them after reeling for a time when they staggered you. I very much like to imagine you as resilient. Please be resilient, for yourself and for me. 

You will have made mistakes, or what you and others gravely consider mistakes. There are no mistakes. There are misfortunes, which then lead on, both to other misfortunes and to marvelous things. Mistakes are for others to appraise in you. Leave them be. If you grieve them, you will only end up confabulating stories about them to make yourself and others feel better about you and your self-improving narrative. Now that would be a mistake.

I imagine you will have forgotten many, most, maybe almost all of our happy episodes together in the years between your birth and the autumn evening I composed these aching words. That’s inevitable. Of all the happiest episodes I had with my own father before I was your age, I remember only a handful vividly. I remember a Sunday afternoon one spring or summer when he and I spent a sunny hour sitting together, digging in the backyard sandbox, his wheelchair parked beside him. He amazed me with all the crenellated constructions he could conjure out of that featureless sand that only slumped into hillocks for me. I remember a dark winter evening when he made fencing foils out of cardboard tubes for the two of us, when he fashioned leftover construction paper into outsized pirate hats. I was in a wheelchair myself that night, and the two of us, both little people with bones of brittle china, rolled back and forth daringly as we dueled, sword fighting with our cardboard and laughing until our hats fell off.

A few memories like that, memories that were exceptionally pleasant, cheerful, and good, I prefer to imagine, hopefully, you’ve also retained. And I hope you are glad to hear from me, even if not from whomever or whatever nothing I have become myself by then, to hear from me as I now, ever-shifting, like everyone, still am. I choose to imagine you reading all these letters seriously, carefully, glad to have them, and to have these memories of the mostly-gone people I've recorded in them.

I imagine you as a bright young woman reading, as a strong and curious being. I hope you humor me in these imaginations. And I hope you choose to keep these letters, keep me, with you, then.

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.

Episode

There’s a gap in your life that your memories can never fill in, that only an older person’s memories can fill in for you. It’s the time between your birth (or, if you prefer, your conception) and the earliest moment that you can now recall as an episodic memory, whenever that moment occurred, probably sometime around the age of five, if you’re like most of us, possibly when you were only three or four. 

I used to think a lot about that gap, in the year or two after you were born. It’s staggering to watch an infant learn, savor, chortle, and scream with fury, hurt, or delight, all the while knowing that not one of those vivid moments will be available as memories to that child, grown up. I circled around and back around to this conundrum as I watched you, returning to the subject in poem after poem after poem.

Assuming they survive the vicissitudes of preservation, the thousands of photos and numerous short videos that your mother and I made of you during those pre-episodic years, plus all of the usual documentations that accompany personhood in this era, will stand in for actual memory. Sometimes they may even jog it (and warp it as well). I was startled once, recently, staring at a small snapshot of what appears to be my third Christmas, when I would have been two. I was struck by an eerie memory, not of that moment, but of that day. It had been exceptionally grey and dark, and my Uncle Jack and Aunt Karen had come over to our house to celebrate. Something about the darkness of the photograph, which had to have been taken Christmas morning, brought back in a rush the unsettled combination of strangeness and excitement I had felt.

My pictures were fairly rare, mostly taken on special occasions; yours have been vastly more numerous. I don’t know yet what that may mean for the way your memory functions in you. Here’s just one picture I took of you at your third Christmas when you were two. It’s a terrible picture, but I chose it for the Christmas morning parallel and for the strong sense of that day’s atmosphere. The odds seem long against it giving the same jolt of recognition to you that the blurry, ancient snap of me in my sailor hat gave me. But, maybe.

What can I fill in for you today? I often tell you stories about your younger self. At this age of seven, you prefer the funny stories that will embarrass you when you are older: how you used to like to grunt when you danced in your diaper; the time you hopped off your training potty to stand tall and calmly poop on the floor. When you were four, you loved to hear the story of how you were born from Mama’s belly and how I caught you, almost dropped you, startled by your open eyes. Now that story’s old news. Who knows what you’ll want to know by the time you read this, if you do.

The memories I would like to keep include all the ones when you collected outdoor things, all those leaves, petals, clods of dirt, gobs of mud, worms, beetles, lizards, tadpoles, toads, snails, slugs, butterflies, ants, praying mantises, and bugs. I hope you still like bugs. Even tarantulas never frightened you, and you and I together once ushered a whip-fast snake out of the house. It was non-venomous, of course, but your calm, collected help in herding it back out the door was impressive for a three year-old. In Canada, you used to chase the occasional garter snake, calling them “gardener snakes,” which always delighted me.

Speaking of “gardener snakes,” your language development itself was ordinary and bewitching. You started out calling everything “nyah-nyah,” and it used to amuse me when your mother and your grandmother would both insist it was the other you were naming, each secretly believing, if I had to guess, it was she who you thus addressed. Between one and two, you developed a massive repertoire of animal sounds you could produce on cue. My favorite was the giraffe. “What does the giraffe say?” You remained stoically silent, having been taught that the giraffe says nothing. It gave me hope you would defeat all trick questions when the time came.

There was “ye-yo” for yogurt, “lellow” for yellow, and of course, “Sukha” for Sequoia, which enchanted your mother, sukha being the Pali word for all things good, in the early Buddhist sutras. For years, you demanded that we call you Sukha, and by the time you changed your mind and demanded that we call you Sequoia again, I had a hard time switching back. I still rather like the name you gave yourself.

All cute things must pass, however, and in any case, I doubt that the memories most darling to a father would prove most precious to you. I wish I knew. I rack my brain for some ideally worthwhile scene from your forgotten years, something never caught in any photo, nor narrated to you repeatedly already, nor referenced somewhere in a poem. 

The summer you were two, which was also the summer you discovered leopard slugs and garter snakes, we rented a cabin that was only a modified trailer. You could run around by then, which meant I was already somewhat dependent on your sweet-tempered behavior to not have to worry over much about you running away from me and my bandy legs. You were getting too big already for tottering me to carry, although almost any other adult could still scoop you up easily. In the mornings, your mother, who was battling insomnia, would sleep in, and you and I would entertain each other in the small front room for hours. I was amazed, frankly, at what a good job you did, even at two, of playing quietly so that your mother could sleep while we colored or pretended to be monsters. Still, you had your moments of defiance. After all, you were a toddler.

One sunny morning we drove over to Wendy Harlocks’ place, to pick up something she had for us and to spend a little time with her. When I was ready to get back in the truck and needed to buckle you into your car seat, the imp mood struck you. You refused to climb in, then you ran around the trees near the truck and hid. Then you hopped out of reach. After a while, I stood by the driver’s door simply waiting. Wendy asked if I wanted her help grabbing you and seating you forcefully into your chair. I said, no, I trusted you would heed me eventually and get in. Besides, I couldn’t always count on having a spare adult around to catch and carry you for me. After a while, Wendy shrugged and went back into her house. (Years later, she asked me “Did you ever coax her into the truck? I mean, I assume you did. The next time I looked you were gone.” But I hadn’t really coaxed you, that’s the thing.)

For a minute or two, after Wendy had left, you continued playing the defiant little truant. And then you looked at me with some kind of comprehension I’m still not sure I could explain. “Okay, Papa,” you said, nonchalantly. “I sit in my seat.” And you climbed up contentedly and let me buckle you in. I felt neither triumphant nor relieved, exactly. I felt like we had a deal, and I felt that I, who couldn’t chase or capture you, was also content with it.

I wish I could give you back that memory, that contented expression of yours to savor. It was like a pact between us that we kept, and although you sometimes stalled or complained, after that you never gave me much trouble about climbing into a car again. (Although you did go through a silly phase when you insisted on getting into the car through the door opposite or farthest from the seat you were aiming for.)

If you could remember that episode for yourself, perhaps you could also explain to me exactly what you felt. That’s what finally locks a memory in, what gets the distortions and facts to gel--when we remember, when we think, this happened, way back when, and this is how it felt.

A Missoulian

What was it about Missoula, Montana? It was just a town, a small city. A third of a century ago, it was only a less expensive, less populous version of what it is today. It had generic shopping strips, a compact “historic” downtown, a few movie theaters, hotels and motels, a state university. By the time you read this, you’ll probably associate all of Montana more with your Grandpa Joe from Chinook than with me. And that’s alright. He’s a genuine Montanan. I was a sojourner for whom, for a couple of years in the eighties, Missoula was mightily appealing. And I’m still not entirely sure why.

One of the happiest days of my life was the day I arrived in Missoula, in June 1985. It was ridiculous. I’d fled New Jersey after breaking up with my girlfriend and walking away from my desk job. I was twenty-two, bearded, disabled, and nearly destitute, with all of my remaining money wadded up as twenties in my boot. I was a three-time college dropout who had wangled his way into a graduate program at the University of Montana. I had no prospect of fresh income until I was to begin a lousy $400-a-month teaching assistantship that fall. I had no friends or connections in town, and I’d never set foot in Montana before. I was on top of the world.

My first week, I hardly spoke to a soul. I found a cheap basement apartment with a shared bath in a Craftsman-style bungalow across from campus. I found a bookstore. I attended a service at the corner Episcopal church, just for the hell of it. In one of the most heroic physical feats of my life, I limped all the way up the trail on the face of Mt. Sentinel to sit on the stem of the giant, white concrete “M,” admiring the view, and then, half walking, half sliding by the seat of my pants, and somehow without breaking a bone, I made it back down again. I bought myself a pizza to celebrate.

Ten days in, I made my first friend. A tall, goofy guy with curly hair and spectacles who served sandwiches at the “Chimney Corner” asked me if I liked jazz. I didn’t really know. What kind of jazz? Miles Davis kind of jazz. I didn’t know Miles Davis. He gave me a look like I’d confessed that I couldn’t add and invited me to hear his quartet play at a downtown bar called “Mary’s Place” that night. His name was Matt.

That first summer passed in a haze. There, in the most unlikely of places, between all the cowboy joints and hippy hangouts, was my Jazz Age. Mary’s Place turned out to be a dark, upstairs dive haunted by musicians, alcoholics and local poets, who often amounted to one and the same. A block away in one direction was the square-jawed Stockman’s Cafe (“Liquor Up Front; Poker In The Rear”) and a few blocks past that the air was usually thick with Patchouli and Oolong inside Butterfly Herbs. Wander any other direction—more bars, more cafes, more poker places such as The Ox, plus a porn cinema where Tracy Takes Tokyo played. 

The whole town felt like a movie set to me: too compact, too small to be so complete. In northern New Jersey, despite the millions of us packed tightly together, most of our media and entertainment came from New York City, “The City,” as though there could be none other, but here, in this town of maybe forty-thousand, surrounded by nothing but sprawling, grassy ranch land, crop-top mountains, paper mills, and stands of lodgepole pines, they watched their own TV stations that logged off the air right at midnight, listened to their own range of radio call letters, read their own flimsy newspaper, bought books by their own writers, and divided up the world amongst themselves. 

All over the sidewalks that year, leftist students had stenciled, “SANDINO SAYS USA OUT!” while back and white POW-MIA flags, looking vaguely like Jolly Rogers, were displayed at auto dealerships, in the plate glass windows of cowboy bars, and hanging off of pick-up trucks and almost every Harley Hog. The most popular movie in Missoula that summer was Rambo: First Blood Part Two, yet in the shady yard behind the bungalow that I shared with four other renters, the evening air was thick with cannabis every night, and all the talk was of literature and Earth First. A sign over the communal downstairs toilet read, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, send it down.” 

Each midnight, when the TV stations signed off, Lee Greenwood vocalized over a picture of the proudly waving Stars-&-Stripes, and the side streets were mostly empty for hours. After being slipped free gin-&-tonics by the friendly barmaid at Mary’s, I often prowled the river paths and lawns with friends or alone. One night, wandering home a bit too drunk from sitting through back-to-back gigs by my new, Cool Jazz-worshipping musician pals, I spotted a classic Thunderbird with a teal-and-white paint job parked under a handsome maple. I liked the look of it so much, I lay down in the grass beside it and slept until dawn. No one disturbed me; no one complained.

Near the end of summer, Mt. Sentinel caught fire. It looked like a field of hell from the campus footbridge at night, thousands of glowing patches like the campfires of an army in the dark. Classes started. I began my improbable new existence as a graduate student and composition teacher. I made more new friends. I moved. I moved again. When winter set in early, I bought my first pair of Sorrels.

Around my twenty-third birthday, hinged between the fires and the fall, a good friend from New York flew out to visit me. I had no car but borrowed someone’s to meet her at the airport. (I’d wasted twenty minutes waiting for a taxi the night I’d first arrived myself. Finally, the flight crew walked out of the airport and asked me if someone was picking me up. I told them I was waiting on a taxi. They laughed and took me into town with them in their hotel’s van.) My friend, Terry, was immediately struck by the airport’s impressive display of taxidermy, including the bison, cougar, and rearing grizzly.

A couple of days into her visit, Terry and I got on a bus and headed north to Glacier Park. It was the first time I’d left town since a visit with the jazzmen to Billings in July. Terry and I rode up in the back seats of a Greyhound, past Paradise and Flathead Lake. A middle-aged man with a Stetson and handlebar mustache decided he liked the looks of Terry and, as soon as he overheard her mention New York, began regaling her with wild animal yarns. She was too polite to dispute him when he claimed the mountain lion he’d killed and eaten had tasted pretty much like chicken. I rolled my eyes.

We got off at Kalispell and walked to a “Rent-a-Wreck.” The wreck itself we drove up Going-to-the-Sun Road. Here and there, we got out and wandered around. We didn’t have time or equipment to camp in the Park, but from up there, Montana looked grand. It looked a bit like Switzerland would, if no one had finished properly taming and tunneling it.

By the time we got back to Missoula, we were satisfied. Terry had seen enough to say she’d been there and enjoyed it. (As far as I know, she never returned.) I had seen enough to know I wanted to stay. When Terry flew back to New York, I was sorry to say goodbye to her, but for the first time in my life I was glad to not be the one flying away.

I finished my degree in two years. I learned a deeper appreciation of winter, of winter complete with brown ice and inversions and whole weeks of subzero. I wrote a lot of what I was proud to call poetry. I taught myself how to teach. I found out I taught pretty well.

When I finished, I had to leave. There was a professorial career and, first, a fat stipend at Emory University calling me South. I had turned some kind of corner. I was no longer a delinquent, a drop out, a black sheep. I wouldn’t ever be one again, not until about the time I started writing you these pieces.  

But for the next several years, Missoula, strange Missoula, visited my dreams. Over and over again, I would have some form of a dream in which I knew that I was dreaming but was enjoying it all the same and was determined not to wake. Always in that dream I had returned to a version of Missoula, even weirder than the original, usually much smaller and more remote, but recognizably the same. And each time I could stay. Then I’d wake.

The first time that I did, very briefly, return, I brought my Alabama girlfriend with me. She’d heard so much about the place from me, I was certain she would love it. I was delighted to show it to her, to finally be back. Then we spent a day in miserable rain, got stuck in traffic behind a downtown accident, and ate a lousy lunch. The forecast for the next few days was similar. We were in the middle of a massive, seven-week cross-country roadtrip, and my girlfriend was eager to move on to somewhere better. By the next day we were in Idaho, eating trout by the sunny Snake. It would be a decade before I came back through Missoula again.

On a May Sunday in 2001, I passed through on my way down from the Yukon to Salt Lake. The weather was crystalline. The town was quiet. For some reason, I chose to drive over to what had been my second residence back in 1985, an attractive, single-family brick Victorian where I had lived upstairs, splitting three rooms with two friends. We’d had a good ghost story there, when one of my roommates had shrieked that a solemn-faced little girl was staring at her through the second-story window late one night. On this fine spring Sunday morning of the new millennium, a pleasant-faced woman was out working in her yard. I chatted with her about the place, which she now owned. Had she known the previous owner, our eccentric landlady, I asked, a towering blonde named Sandra who announced one day that she was henceforth to be called Inge and began affecting a faux Swedish accent? No? We used to call her “Sandringa” among ourselves. The woman gave a little chuckle. She was interested in the ghost story, though. No, she’d never seen one, but she’d always suspected. 

After that, I revisited Missoula a couple more times on my own. I never did anything special other than rent a hotel room on the Clark Fork, stroll around campus, maybe take in a show at the old movie palace, The Wilma, where you could still order cocktails with your popcorn. Mostly I just went back to soak it in. The suburban sprawl had grown quite a bit and the neighborhood near campus had subtly gentrified, but the campus and downtown itself had hardly changed. For me, it was still a little unreal, like stepping into and out of an odd but comforting dream.

In 2008, I brought your mother to town with me. We were in love, and although she’d been all over the mountain west, she’d never been to Missoula. Again, I thought she’d be delighted, and again, as with my Alabama girlfriend, the trip did not go well. It was hot. There seemed to be nothing to do all weekend, and then we discovered that we’d just missed a free outdoor concert by one of her favorite musicians. All for the best, I guess. The next day we left to go exploring and ended up discovering Nelson, the town of your birth, although of course we didn't know that yet.

We did try to visit Missoula again, more than once, but largely because the town happened to lie on the shortest route between our winters in southern Utah and our summers in BC. I swear, every time we stopped there, something went wrong. One time we spent a night there when you were a nursing baby and had a lovely summer evening ruined when you choked on a piece of fresh melon our friendly restaurant server cut for you. For a second, we thought you'd choke to death. It was always something like that. Yet, whenever I passed through alone, the place still charmed me somehow, the light on the river, the off-key rhythms, the quieter streets.

Here’s what I think. There’s no good rhyme or reason for why we love a particular city or a landscape any more than for why we fall in love with a person or even just a charming face. Either that, or the landscape is secretly capable of loving us back, and we’re too small to recognize its jealous embrace. When I go through Missoula alone, Missoula is happy to see me again. But if I arrive with a human lover, that peculiar little city dwelling on what was once the bottom of a glacial lake is jealous and cold shoulders us. I don’t appreciate such pettiness, but I’ll confess I’m still a little crazy for the place.

Fears

At the time I’m writing this, a time that will be long ago for you by the time, if ever, you read it, you’ve been going through a prolonged phase of fear of the dark, especially the solitary dark. You’re seven; it’s not that surprising, but you’re generally a brave girl, so theories for your fears have been tempting. Your mother and your grandparents vote that the cause is too much exposure to Lord Voldemort, and you do seem to fear Rowling’s villain, but I’m skeptical that the culprit’s him, and I have reasons.

There’s the conundrum of where and when your fear begins. The more I think it over, the less certain I am how far back it actually goes. It might not even be yours. More than once, I’ve gone to the woods with your mother when she was exhilarated by the prospect of a long hike while I waited for her, only to have her return quickly and insist she could go no further alone. It’s not the actual risk that gets to her, as she will happily camp and wander by herself for days across desert landscapes twice as dangerous as any forest in California or BC. She used to fixate on bears as the problem, but she mostly conquered that fear through a few random, harmless encounters. In any case, I think it was the shadow she made from the idea of bears that terrified her, not the bears themselves. Her fear of going into the woods alone still comes and goes, but when it strikes her, it’s exactly like your fear of entering an empty room in the house. It’s an abrupt, stubborn, absolute refusal to go into a particular shadow zone alone. I could never reliably predict when her fear would hit her, as I can’t entirely predict when your fear will possess you, but once in the grip, neither one of you will budge. Coaxing or reasoning with either of you only makes you more upset. I wouldn’t claim that it was down to genetics, not without better evidence, but the pattern seems inherited, in some way. 

As an infant and a toddler, you were always a light sleeper, equally prone to wake from nightmares or happy dreams of flying alike, but never in need of more light. It crept up on you after you reached about four: a nightlight, a soft lamp, a hallway light all night. You were five when you started annoying your mother by demanding that one of us accompany you, at least as far as the bathroom door, every time you had to go pee. This didn’t seem to be a problem for you at school or outdoors, just at home. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that you initially did this only when you didn’t want the two of us talking without you in the room, perhaps because you knew we talked about you a lot, or you were jealous of our affection for each other, or perhaps because you felt your presence could prevent us from ever getting upset with each other. 

For at least a year, as I recall, you would be fine moving around the house on your own so long as you and I were home alone, but if the three of us were in the kitchen or at the table, you would invariably beg for one of us to follow you if you wanted for any reason to leave the room. Fear was just an easy excuse at first that gradually became more real. By the time you were six or six and a half, you started insisting that I stay in a room with you or accompany you into an empty room, whether your mother was around or not. I suspect this may also have had something to do with an inherited character trait of yours, but one that neither your mother or I have, a longing to be around people, someone at least, almost all the time. I’m a terrible hermit and your mother says she played at her happiest for hours alone as a child. It drives her to distraction when the only way for you to be contented by yourself is if you’re immersed in a screen for a while. 

Again, I suspect inheritance, and this time it would almost have to be genetic. My father, the grandfather you never knew, was social in exactly the same way as you. Throughout his life, he found it depressing, not to say distressing, to be in a room or a house alone. His own mother was convinced that this was down to his invalid childhood, but I was an invalid kid, too, and I was uninterested in too many visitors, usually happier with a stack of books and a window with a good, green view. 

So, I think you begin already with a bit of your mother’s abrupt fear reflex and a bit of your paternal grandfather’s loathing of being very long alone. Toss in a bit of the typical kid fear of dark closets and such. But why has it amplified more recently? The answer no one seems to want to touch is that your mother and I broke up. 

Indeed, breaking up seems more of an exact description than a dead metaphor in our case. We disintegrated as a couple, bit by bit, over the past two years. I won’t go into all the reasons here, and I’d bet that by the time you’re old enough to read this you know them well, maybe understand them better than I now do. But you’ve got a sensitive emotional barometer, and you probably could always tell. You may have sensed it before we could tell or admit it to ourselves.

And simply, physically, well before we fully separated, you were spending more and more time with one of the other of us, less and less time with us both. Your mother went on meditation retreats and long solo camping trips lasting as much as weeks. I took you to school each morning but came home late. For two weeks, I was on a road trip across the breadth of Canada. And so forth. Likely, it all cemented the sense at the base of your awareness that, whenever  you were with one or the other of us, there was no one in the other room, anymore.

I’ve been living with your grandparents the past few months, and I’ve noticed your fear seems less when you’re with all of us. Grandpa Joe is up early and stomps about the kitchen, then heads downstairs to his office. Grandma is upstairs on the second floor much of the time, always available for visits and coming down throughout the day to see what is going on with us. It’s your sort of world, where there’s always someone with you who loves you and someone else who loves you somewhere about the house. Ditto when your grandparents stay with you and your mother down south.

But there was that one weekend when Grandma and Grandpa Joe were down there with Mama, while you were up here with me in the big, three-level house, mostly empty. It snowed heavily for two days and then it really was just us in our snow globe. We binged on your Harry Potter books and rewatched the first two or three of the Potter movies, along with more little kid stuff. It was fun. We snuggled and stayed in our PJs and spoiled ourselves with a bowl of ice cream each night. But as full as the house felt to me, given that you were in it, I could see how empty it seemed to you with only me.

And that’s what fear is, ultimately, for all of us, the dread of not enough. Oh, there’s the sharp shock of startlement and fright, that’s different, yes. Sometimes we shriek. But that’s not the kind of fear that incapacitates any of us. It’s the dread of loss, of sinking unsupported into a world that’s insufficient, that’s inhospitable to us that can paralyze and start us projecting our boggarts into the corners, our hungry bears and Voldemorts. 

When I was a year younger than you are now, on one of my surgical trips to the hospital, I had a terrible fright. I was in traction, awaiting surgery, immobilized in my high, barred bed, watching a television hung from the wall opposite me. This was before they started outfitting pediatric beds with remote controls, so I was left to watch whatever the nurse had put on for me, at least until the next nurse came around. The Friday Night Flick, or whatever it was called, happened to be Vincent Price’s 1961 adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum. The final scene is of a person accidentally left to die in a torture chamber being walled up, helplessly gagged and locked into an Iron Maiden. Through a small, barred grill you can see the pleading, hopeless, horrified eyes. To my small self it was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen, the most terrible I could possibly imagine. It frightened me, and then it haunted me for years.

Of course, whenever I told the story of being terrified by that scene to adults, they clucked their tongues and said something stern about the inattentive nurse who had let a six-year old watch something so inappropriate for me. My mother didn’t approve of TV or movies to begin with, and only grudgingly conceded they helped the boredom of long stays in the hospital. Letting me watch something like a Vincent Price movie was just a sin, a literal sin, as far as she was concerned. 

I retold the story with increasing relish as I grew. I often emphasized how my terror had caused me to wrench in my traction, causing me considerable pain, and how the face in the iron maiden was a ghastly shade of green. Once, a girlfriend I was telling this to pointed out to me that I had said it was a black-&-white TV. So it was, I realized. I must have imagined that sickening shade of green. I put it down to how upsetting, indeed nauseating, the scene had seemed to me.

It was decades before something else occurred to me. I hadn’t been scared just because of the movie on TV. I was already scared because I was in the hospital. I was scared of surgery. Back then all hospital wards, even pediatric wards, were the same creepy shade of sickly green that continued around the halls, in the color of the scrubs, and into the Operating Room.  I had been frightened of surgery since I was four, not because of the cutting, the stitches, or the pain, but because I had a grim memory of the first time a stranger held the awful black rubber mask over my face and ordered me to breathe deeply. You see?

Today, I would probably still say that the nurse was a bit negligent who left me with that particular movie on the TV. But I no longer think that she in any way harmed me. In fact, I think that scene may have helped my fears overall. I was a small child caught in a miasma of distressing experiences that were out of my control, unclear, and alarming to me. That scene’s close-up of the wide eyes trapped behind the iron lid gave me a focal point, a single sum and substitute for all the real things I was afraid of—an image, most importantly, of something that I knew was unreal, was not happening to me, and likely never would happen to me. Neither will Lord Voldemort will ever be lurking in an empty hall for you, which is why he’s a good scare for you to seize upon, however inappropriate he may seem for a child of seven to be considering, and even if just reading about him lurking can still make you jump a little, years from now, at the thought of a half-empty house.

Prejudiced

In my family, in my neighborhood, when I was a kid, no one ever used the word “race,” not that I recall. We had more than a dozen racial and ethnic categories that we deployed freely, often vividly, but we viewed most of those terms as fixed, as givens. The only potent, contested word regarding such things was “prejudiced.” Are you prejudiced? Who’s prejudiced? I’m not prejudiced! 

Of course, we were all prejudiced. But on the spectrum of prejudices in our mostly white neighborhood, my parents, your grandparents, likely held the least flagrant position, and I grew up believing that we were the one family in town truly beyond the risk of prejudice, at least of any racial kind. (Given my local, Catholic friends, I could see pretty easily that my mother was quietly but stubbornly sectarian: she once suggested orange as a good color for us kids to wear on St. Patrick’s Day, and she expressed skepticism that the Pope was a Christian. “He might be, if he’s truly asked Jesus into his heart as His Lord and Savior,” she observed one evening at dinner, “But I doubt it.”)

In the era of white flight, assassinations, riots, and the ongoing fight for Civil Rights, my parents made a point of preaching racial tolerance and equality to their children. One of the earliest children’s hymns I learned was “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and I learned it in the Hausa language, which my mother had learned in Nigeria. From it and other cues, I got the gist that skin tone was irrelevant to Jesus, and so should be irrelevant to us. Once, when we had stopped somewhere in rural Georgia on a family trip to Florida, my mother made sure that I took note of a segregated water fountain that she’d found, and then that I understood why such an item was hateful and wrong. The summer that I turned five, 1967, the summer of the nearby Newark riots, my parents had two children come to stay with us from Harlem, on the Fresh Air Fund, for two weeks each, first a boy named Ronnie and then a girl named Cheryl. My mother felt it would be helpful both to them and to me and my little sister Alleene, given how white our neighborhood was then. Before that time, I was so unused to encountering dark skin that, when we visited Manhattan, which was scarcely twenty miles distant, I asked my mother if this was “the country of the brown-skinned people.” 

The next year, 1968, a few months after Dr. King’s assassination, my parents took me out of the local public school, which was nearly all white, and enrolled me and my sister Alleene in a Baptist elementary that was thoroughly integrated. The switch had more to do with the fact that the public school felt uncomfortable about my disability and was unwilling to let me attend regular classes when I was in a wheelchair, whereas the church school didn’t care. But in practice it meant that, even before the adoptions of my Korean, African-American, and mixed-race siblings, I was habituated to interacting with Latin, Black, and Asian children as playmates and classmates, from the age of six. At eight, I was given a tri-color Afro pick with a folding handle by my best friend David Mordecai. I took it home and proudly folded and and unfolded it for my father, intoning solemnly, as David had taught me, “Black is for the people. (Point to the black plastic comb.) Red is for the blood they shed. (Fold over the red half of the handle.) Green is for the land. (Fold over the green half of the handle.)” The land was Africa. My mother agreed it was green and that an awful lot of blood had been shed.

There were inconsistencies of course, some that I'm sure I missed but some that I noticed. My father still held, at least jokingly, a variety of ethnic stereotypes that he didn’t think were really prejudices. Poles could be dumb, Scots were often skinflints, Irish liked to drink and join the police. "But I'm not prejudiced," he'd say. His official policy was that Black people as individuals were just as capable of accomplishing anything as White people were, but that as a group they had a harder time of it because Africa had fallen behind the rest of the world and was backwards, which made no causal sense at all in 1960s New Jersey but satisfied him. 

My mother was a bit weirder. Her faith mandated that all humans were identically wicked at birth and identically capable of salvation and rebirth. She was also proud of being a New Englander, descended from centuries of New Englanders, on the right and godly side of the slavery issue and of the U.S. Civil War. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a staple hymn of our church and household, and my mother always sang it as if it were still a marching chant, hitting the stressed syllables like hammer blows. “EYES! SEEN! GLOR! COME! LORD! TRAMP! VINT! GRAPES! WRATH! STORED!”

Yet, she likewise held the rural New Englander’s pride in the great virtue of her own skepticism and common sense, which led her into odd reasonings about race. She couldn’t see the validity of calling one group of people “colored,” for instance (“We’re all colored some kind of color!”), nor of referring to “White” and “Black” people (“‘Pink’ and ‘Brown’ is more like it! Why not say that?”). On one occasion, she confided in me that she felt it was exceptionally stupid for “prejudiced people” to compare Africans to apes because, after all, apes had thin lips like Europeans and also had skin that, under their very straight ape hair, was pale. I stared at her blankly, being all of about six or seven years old myself and not yet acquainted with any apes, but she gave me a triumphant look, as if she’d just solved a geometry proof, and said no more on the subject.

I remained innocent of the capacity for prejudice in myself or in my friends until I was a teenager in boarding school. (It’s amazing that any naïveté at all about one’s self survives high school.) My junior year, I befriended an introverted giant of a boy, a senior named Scott, who could have been typecast as a Viking. He had shaggy blonde hair, stood just shy of 6’4,” and had powerful arms. He was the kind of guy automatically recruited to be a linebacker for the football team, even though he didn't particularly care for football, wore thick glasses, was painfully shy, and always strode about campus in a hangdog attitude, staring at the ground.

We had a fondness for punk music and science fiction in common, otherwise not much, and yet we bonded. In addition to being a football player and a star wrestler, Scott was a townie and an art geek who was constantly sketching and who obsessively collected Marvel comic books. I was a disabled boarding student who couldn’t draw a straight line, knew next to nothing of Marvel comics beyond the Spider-Man and Wolverine characters, and whose own obsession was novels. I wanted to act in plays. Scott wanted never to have to see a play. 

What united us was really just loneliness and marginal status. From a schoolmaster's description, you might not think we were outcasts: he was a jock, the son and grandson of prominent alums; I was a goody-goody, a scholarship boy, a dorm prefect, an academic standout, and an occasional actor. But we were weird. We looked weird, especially as friends, the huge Viking and the little crip. Moreover, in some way that we couldn’t quite define to ourselves, we were cynical about enthusiasms other students took seriously and, no matter how involved we were in those officially important high-school sorts of activities, we didn’t fit in. So, we were friends.

About this time, one of the most popular seniors in my dorm was a jovial, roaring, good-looking Southerner named Jon who enjoyed sounding like Foghorn T. Leghorn, booming out “Boy!” this and “Yo, boy!” that. I never picked up on the fact that he only addressed fellow white boys in this manner, much less what it meant. I wasn't part of his circle. My only pals in the dorm that year were a literary-minded Chinese-American named David Yuan and a rich, ugly Venezuelan kid named Sam. (Sam had a Frida Kahlo unibrow. If we teased him, he would mutter, without apparent irony or humor, "Dafid! Mark! You are my berry, berry good friends. But now I'm go-eeng to haf to keel you." David and I would fall about laughing at this, Sam would frown as if trying to concentrate his magnificent eyebrow into a single exclamation point, and then our conversation, which was usually about music, would move on.) We didn’t hang out with either the cool White boys or the cool Black packs. So, I was ripe for stupidly walking into the middle of a nastiness I didn’t yet understand.

One Saturday night, I was hanging out in the dorm’s lobby, by myself, doing nothing that I can recall, probably reading a book. A senior named Dave, who was the most popular of the upperclass African-American guys in the dorm, swaggered by with a couple of his younger friends and teased me about something irrelevant. I tried being cool and jovial in my response, imitating the retort style of that very popular boy, Southern Jon. I don’t know what I said, exactly, but I do know that I tossed a “boy!” in somewhere in my witty reply. 

In a split second, my dormitory Tiny-Tim mascot status notwithstanding, Dave had grabbed me, literally, by the throat and was cursing me to my face. Before I could even get past the immediate shock, I heard a roar over my shoulder and Dave himself was being lifted into the air by Scott, who had just stopped by to say hi. There was more cursing and even some body slamming, thankfully on the other side of the lobby from me, and then our dorm master, Russell Witherspoon, popped his head out of his doorway down the hall to see what the hell was going on. A lean, dark-skinned Black man, nearly as tall as Scott, with a lilting baritone purr of a voice, 'Spoon had all the combatants separated in a second or two.

Afterward, in the sit-down interview with Mr. Witherspoon, I learned exactly what it meant for me to call a Black man "boy." I was shaken. I protested my innocence as well as my ignorance and cited popular Southern Jon’s bluff habit of calling people “boy,” but I apologized. Dave calmed down. Witherspoon excused us. Scott stalked home. 

That lesson about the danger of using "boy" was embarrassing but easy to absorb. It was like the time in fifth grade that I had gotten in trouble for a caricature. I had been doodling at my desk, trying to make something interesting-looking by drawing with a compass. I had gotten as far as a neat semicircle with a triangle on top, but I was stuck. The girl who shared my desk looked over at my drawing and hissed, “give it a face with slanty eyes.” I complied, then looked at her for further advice. Our fifth-grade teacher, Miss Storm had just been engaged to a man by the name of Eng. “Now, write ‘Mr. Eng’ on it and hide it on Miss Storm’s desk,” the girl giggled. Thinking that I was impressing my classmate, I did as she said. When Miss Storm found the drawing, she was visibly shaken and demanded to know who did it. I knew nothing yet of the coolie stereotype I'd just drawn, but I was ashamed and confessed. It was an embarrassing lesson in prejudice, but easily learned.

So should have been the lesson in high school, but it was the discovery in the wake of the “boy” incident that was harder to process. Giant Scott, my friend and my rescuer, my hero of sorts, couldn’t let it go. The next summer, after he’d already graduated and I’d gone to work as a camp counselor, I would get letters from him containing sketches of new superhero characters he'd invented and, uncomfortably, edgy rantings about “our Black friends.” At first, I tried to pretend Scott meant only Dave and his pals, that their blackness was incidental to his irritation with their behavior to me, but the queasy feeling in my gut kept indicating that my hero friend was probably a racist. Or, as I passed it off to myself then, my pal Scott was “very prejudiced.” 

I had another friend like that, the same year, and although he and Scott never met, in my mind now the two are lumped together. Jim was another outsider type, smart and sarcastic, but he lived in ‘Jersey, the oldest son of a church friend of my father’s. Jim was superficially unlike either Scott or me. He was pale, runty, and thin. He played the piano and composed meandering songs out of batches of chords as if he were tossing logs on the keyboard. His hobbies were camping, beer, and affecting a corncob pipe as if he were Huck Finn. He and I took canoeing trips together that summer. He was smart and creative, but it slowly dawned on me that Jim, like Scott, had a festering resentment within. He and I had both taken a couple of years of high school German. At first, it was an easy bonding routine, to exchange greetings and trivial conversations in our execrable Deutsch. We’d both been to see Apocalypse Now, and I thought it was merely funny when Jim strapped a cheap tape-deck to a strut of the canoe and played “Ride of the Valkyrie” one afternoon as we paddled down a quiet stream. But then he started asking me what I thought of an idea he had for a club he was calling “Viertel Reich,” and he asked me to help him work up a sketch for a modified swastika logo for it.

Feeling queasy again, I attempted a redirect. I told Jim that we should make it clear that this club of his was ironic and clever and mocking of anything like an actual fascination with the Nazis. I drew him a “swastika” that was composed of four question marks rotating clockwise, like a pinwheel, around a single period. Jim didn’t like it. We drifted apart pretty soon, and, except at his father's funeral, I never saw him again.

I stayed friends with Scott, however, at least through our correspondences, and I excused myself by carefully avoiding any direct reply whenever he asked me a leading question in a letter about how things were the next year in my dorm with "our Black friends." I visited him one time in Chicago, several years later, after he had graduated from an evangelical college and married into money. He and his bride were only twenty-three but owners of a lofty condo opposite the Lincoln Park Zoo. Scott was struggling to sell his drawings and lived off his wife's trust fund. We never mentioned race at dinner that night, I should say, not in any way. Outside their guest bedroom window in the wee morning, I could hear the eerie combination of sirens and lions roaring. That was the last time I visited them.

As for the Dave whom I'd insulted, incidentally, although he and I were never very friendly, and although I doubt he really believed that I hadn’t meant anything racist by addressing him as “boy” that evening that Scott had tackled him, he did do me the favor of introducing me to the music of George Clinton and P-Funk the next school year, and for that I remain grateful to him. His own best friend, Louis, who was there in the lobby the night we all scrapped, ended up at Princeton with me. Unlike me, Louis graduated. 

The past is a pond, pretty much like the one on my Grandma Wetherbe’s farm. It's pretty from a distance and it silts up over time. Plants shove in from all sides, if you don’t disturb it or dredge it, and the surface can paper over solidly with water lilies, as if it a were a grounded flowerbed. There’s plenty of muck at the bottom and clear water that will run, with some work, even then. These days, I think of boys like Scott and Jim and me whenever I read of some punk white kid who’s snuck off to join up with white supremacists or ISIS. There’s that dream of belonging to a unified, dangerous outsider’s club that haunts certain uncool young loners, always has and will. And, once caught in that dream, a prejudice, of whatever type, is body armor against the demons.

In the decades after high school, I never hesitated to tell people how my mother, her evangelical sectarianism aside, had raised me to see all others as equals and race as irrelevant. I told stories of her and of my multiracial siblings to my fellow grad students, then to my students at Utah, Alabama, and Morehouse. I still believe it was a good thing to have grown up singing, “all are precious in His sight," whatever the language I sang it in.

But there was a day in the late nineties, I forget exactly when, perhaps just after my father had died, just before the millenium, when my brother Jimmy and I were going through an old cardboard box of family snapshots that included a few early pictures of our parents as a couple, from before I was born. And there we found a Kodachrome square, blurry but still lurid, of Dad and Mom dressed up for a Halloween party, a few weeks after their wedding, in1961. What costume my father was wearing in the photo, I forget. I was too startled by my mother’s get-up to notice him. There she sat, smiling broadly, in a floral apron and with a red polka-dot bandanna knotted around her head, completely made up in blackface.

I never did talk to her about that. And now it's too late.