I was the first to arrive at our mother’s house. I usually was. Brother Jeff worked evenings and he was never much of an early riser. Me, on the other hand, I had already eaten breakfast and shoveled my driveway. I was planning on shoveling at mom’s house as well, but her neighbor had done us a good turn and got to it first.
I really didn’t want to enter. I had no desire to be in a house with so many memories of family and gatherings and yet be all alone. But it was a bitter cold January morning, and at least there was coffee to be had inside.
Inside, I carefully wiped the snow from my shoes on the mat that had welcomed me so often, obeying the voice of my mother inside my head not to track a mess through the house. It used to annoy me, now I missed it.
I looked around at the old familiar house that was no longer a home. The living room was already being stripped of treasured items claimed by family members. When the center can no longer hold, the family breaks down into component parts. The order I had known all my life was changing. Forever.
Mom had been in the assisted living facility for nearly nine months now. It was a nice place, we were incredibly fortunate to find it. There was no way she could live on her own anymore and Jeff and I and both our wives worked full-time. She needed around the clock attention, there was nothing else we could do.
But it doesn’t make a son feel any better to know that he had done his best. There is never any fitting way to pay back the woman who gave you life and raised you to manhood. It is a humbling admission that time will defeat you and take all you care about and there is nothing you can do about it. There was really nothing to do but sit in those familiar rooms and reflect upon all that had been and realize it had all changed forever. I got a pot of coffee started and dimly wished I still smoked. Moments like these were made for contemplative inhalations of smoke.
As I waited for the coffee, I went to my mom’s CD player and randomly started looking at the CDs she had scattered about, many of the CDs out of their cases or in the wrong ones. It was the music my brother and I rejected when we were younger, preferring Rock And Roll. But looking back, it was the perfect music for parents to listen to. None of it was lewd or vulgar, most of it was songs about love in the purest of forms. And such songs grew sweeter the more the years passed. They had the power to transport one back in time, to the moment when you first remembered hearing them. To a time where life was something waiting for you not something you left behind.
For the length of a song, everything was the way it was back then. It all came back so clear. For a moment I was a child: looked over, protected, loved. The past was something I didn’t know anything about, it was a story told to me by my parents about times they had lived through and people they had known. The past was the Great Depression and World War II. It was my grandfather I had never met and the grandfather I barely knew. It didn’t have anything to do with me.
But somehow my story started being written down in the big book of the past, so that I now had vivid memories of it. And the songs were bringing them all back.
My cellphone rang and tore me from a time that didn’t know anything about cellphones. It was my brother, my gray-haired brother with the bifocals and the protruding stomach. Somehow I got used to that being my brother, although I still remember the kid he was. That was still who he was, underneath all the changes time made to him. He was still that kid, still running late.
“I’ll be there in about an hour,” he said. “Ran into a problem at work.” Still making excuses.
Which left me alone. With a bunch of memories of people who were no longer there. With a bunch of people I missed but couldn’t afford to miss too much because it was pointless to dwell on what would never be again. I played a few more songs while I finished my coffee, Rambling Rose and Those Were The Days. Then I knew I needed to get away from the memories they were dredging up, and so I went downstairs to start the cleanup process so the house could be put on the market. I wanted to hold onto it, but it was already no longer the family home. Dad had passed a dozen years ago, and mom had a new home. Some memories remind you how long things and people have endured, others make you realize nothing endures for long.
I walked down the stairs to the basement and noticed myself being careful as I did. When did I start being careful about going down stairs? How many years did my mother cautiously descend these stairs that were a little too steep, holding on to a handrail that was a little too flimsy? And how long has it been now since she was able to walk down these steps at all, how long since she’s been able to do her own laundry or keep the cobwebs under control?
“Yes, it was time,” I thought to myself. But it didn’t make me feel any better.
The basement had once been the domain of us children. It was where we would play with our Hot Wheels. Or board games. Or invented games. It was where epic contests of NERF basketball were played, where the racetrack was joyously assembled one glorious Christmas Day. It was where battles were fought by little plastic men with Jeff and me the generals, shooting the other’s army down with rubber bands as the other made his final death rattle when his soldier was struck.
I walked to the long, uncarpeted laundry room, one in which a lifetime of possessions slowly retreated from everyday use into cardboard boxes that sought to hold them until they became useful once again. Only they never did. They just accumulated until the shelves became full and mom asked us repeatedly to take our stuff to our own homes. But we never did. They just seemed more at home here. Somehow we wanted them to stay here, perhaps so we could return and see things hadn’t ever really changed. Perhaps we believed if we kept everything just as it was we could not just return home but return to the past and who we were, that the door was not really slammed shut for all time but that our current distractions would one day clear and we could be kids again. And for a long time that fantasy stayed with me. Until one day not too long ago the door did indeed slam shut.
We were here to clear things out, clear everything out. We were here to finally admit that the old days were gone and they were never coming back. The air seemed to grow colder, and I wished Jeff would get here soon. Gray-haired Jeff, the one who would bring me back to reality and away from a past that almost seemed to be imagined.
I gazed at the shelves, many of them sagging from their decades-long struggle of holding up forgotten mementos. Shelves full of albums no one would ever again listen to. Collections released by Reader’s Digest that had been purchased for a steal at garage sales from people who had no more listened to them than my parents did. Other albums that once meant something to someone. I came across one in particular that once meant so much to me: Gene Autry’s Here Come Santa Clause. I remembered my dad buying it when I was young, very young. It was probably one of the first Christmases I could appreciate for the miracle it was, probably one of my best Christmases ever. The cover barely held itself together. Must have been damaged when my mom’s basement flooded some years back. I want to keep it, but know it will end up in the dumpster we’re going to get once we’ve got everything organized. That dumpster is going to need to be a big one.
I dig. Through memories belonging to myself and my family. Old paint cans, Christmas decorations. This was our first year ever we ever had Christmas somewhere other than the old family home. We would never have another one there again.
And then my eyes fall upon a box I remembered from oh so very long ago. It was one that my mom used to use when she had to clean the house in a hurry if unexpected company was coming over. She’d use it to toss in all the items that were sitting out around the house: curtain hooks, lost buttons, mostly our toys. How long had it been sitting there, undisturbed? I would often search through it on a rainy summer day in hopes of finding some lost piece of my Hot Wheels or army man collection. How many items and memories of my childhood had I lost since then?
Memories flood over me as I take out one item at a time. A toy I had purchased from a gum machine, old baseball cards of players whose stats I could still recite. Various knick-knacks, some I remembered, others I did not.
But at the bottom I saw a smaller box which I retrieved. I was surprised to note that it seemed warm to the touch, as if something within had been fermenting all these many years. It was crudely taped shut, and on it my name was written in a child’s hand.
I take out my pocket knife and cut the tape. I am surprised—shocked—to see a line of light shine through where I had just cut.
Before I even open it, I somehow have a sense of what it is. A forgotten memory was once again surfacing. The light from within the box fought off the gloom of the darkened basement, brought warmth to the cold concrete room that had not been able to keep out the January weather.
It was a summer’s day. I knew it was so. The feeling was undeniable, a feeling all the years in the world could not lessen. I did not remember doing so, but I had saved it for my future self.
It was one of those precious ones of early August, when thoughts of school once again loomed large, one of those days you know to be finite, not to be wasted. What a precious gift it must have been to give.
I open it and it smells like bubble gum and comic books. Of cotton candy and the bug truck that sprayed the neighborhood and made everyone run to shut their windows no matter how hot it was. Within the warm light I see a comic book, one I had once seen on the rack but decided not to purchase. I see too an old transistor radio I had inherited from an older cousin, one I had lost track of years beyond measure ago.
I am surprised to find the battery is still good, more surprised to find it playing Summertime by Mungo Jerry as I turn it on.
I turn the station and hear Summer Breeze. Turn it again and hear Summer in the City. Turn a final time to find the Pirates playing the Cubbies. I’m amazed to hear Jack Brickhouse’s voice announce Willie Stargell stepping up to the plate.
I am there. Then.
I find a packet of watermelon seeds we had planted but failed to grow. A sad lesson of childhood. But within the packet are still a few seeds. I am lost for a moment in contemplation of whether those seeds might yet grow, of what other things I might hear on that radio. I think about how Superman will save the day, again, and how long it’s been since I tasted a Marathon Bar like the one packed by me into that small box.
But my brother’s voice from the stairs interrupts my reverie.
“Are you ready?” I couldn’t understand what he was asking. For a moment I was unaware that it was not his voice, not really. It was not the voice I’d grown used to for so long.
But it was Jeff’s voice nonetheless.
“What?” I utter, still foggy from memories.
“Did you find your mitt?” he asks, and I realize what is different about his voice. It is the voice of a child, a voice I remember from so long ago. As he turns the corner I see the boy he had been. And while this surprises me, it startles me even more to realize that though he is a child, he is little shorter than I am.
“Hurry up,” he says. “I’m supposed to be the one who’s always late, remember?” Impulsively, I look into the box, see my old first-base glove at the bottom, barely visible through a variety of smaller relics which sit on top of it. I grab it, smell the familiar aroma of well-worn leather, remember once again how familiar it feels to my hand as if they had been made for each other. With a spring in my step I had not felt for an eternity, I race out the room and up the stairs, two at a time, into a bright summer day. Let my brother follow behind as he may, I will not waste a moment of it.