September 29th passed me by this year like leaves on the winds of this prolonged autumn. If the calendar is right, I spent the day being fingerprinted for TSA PreCheck and riding teens home on their new bikes, complete with lock and helmet. A calm, contented day.
If you are newer in my life, you should know I write on or around this date every year for Mom. It is six years now since Grandma sent me an email telling me to call home. I was in the basement of a learning center in Morocco; I emerged into the salted air and wandered into, then around, a cemetery, settling by the sea to make a call in which I knew what awaited.
I know memories distort over time, corkscrewing their limbs and changing colors, but as far as I can tell this memory — that email, that seaside perch — has remained unchanged. Others, though, have taken up a habit of appearing at random with clay, ghoulish faces. They leave behind a patina that layers on itself, separating then from now.
Sometimes they are from the future. If you know me, you know I don’t shut up about one of my favorite authors, Gabo. He writes often of memory and decay, which go hand in hand. He’s also noted a strange occurrence where real memories die while unreal memories take their place:
“Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.”
I was bartending a wedding the other week. Having taken up residence near the dance floor at the satellite bar, I sipped a beer and watched the routine clock forward: the speeches, the toasts, the first dances. A pattern I’ve seen enough to ignore, so that I zone into a sort of meditation until someone dangles a dollar above the tip jar.
And then the young man took his mother’s hand and they shared a dance. And then I remembered reaching for Mom’s hand at my wedding to dance with her. And then I remembered I’m not married — have never been. What wasn’t real was there. Affront me, briefly, danced a pair of ghosts; my chest grew hot.
I don’t even know that I want to be married. But in some cut from the future, I’d apparently changed my mind. Mom was thrilled.
In these six years, certain details that were so concrete about Angie — what shows she watched, the colors and patterns of the costume jewelry rung and laid thick on her fingers and wrists, the youth of her face when we took off the training wheels and the way that face decayed, looking more and more like a wrung rag up to the point I flew away — those details have left. The patina forms and hardens, a new layer in our family geology, and though it’s supposed to be a beautiful mark of age, none of us admire it. Real memories are trapped beneath while new ones — the unreal ones — play out in blurred animations on the brass.
Using writing as a chisel, it’s possible to get to some of those older memories. They are like fossils. So far I’ve found a mix of scenes: mazes of driveway garage sales. A college visit to Wisconsin. Choir concert side hugs. Broken knick knacks and cracked plastic laundry baskets. Breath of wine and bottles of beer refilled with water. The praise for Mom: “Your kids are so well-behaved.” That’s true. Of course, these are a tiniest fraction of the twenty years we were both here. I expect as time goes on that these will remain, as real fossils are to real archaeologists, hints and clues to a fuller story that happened but can’t be remembered. Grandma and brothers and all the etcetera people in Mom’s life can dig together, piece their findings together, but decay is permanent. The patina triumphs.
And yet I write something every year — out of duty, I guess. It’s always a self-serving piece, fit more for a private journal or a therapy session than for public consumption. But I decided at some point early on, within the first September or two after Mom ended, that she would have appreciated this. Toward the end of her life she was paranoid and shy, wearing dark shades at the checkout stand and keeping few, if any, friends. But she knew and loved that I could write; the idea that I could keep her alive for a while, through scenes real and unreal, would thrill her. Some part of her always wanted to be an artist, but she never got there; the world took her pens and drunk her up. I retain a hunch she always hoped one of her boys would lean into their art, so she could live another of her lives vicariously through him.
This must be a reclamation, then. I don’t know how long it can be kept up. What was real and unreal is as mixed up as ever. Any of the brides I watch dancing, bright and lacy in their dresses, could be her; the tuxedoed sons could be me or my brothers. Patinas of some kind will begin forming, putting pressure on their youth, and they will try to avoid the decay. There is no knowing who will do so.
Mom could not avoid the decay. But like the leaves riding out this prolonged fall, I and Grandma and brothers are still afloat, stalling her further death as long as possible. Some of what was real is definitely forgotten, and I’ve begun questioning the images of Mom I see: is this an original, or a reproduction?
I’ve tried rough cloth and polish and I’m telling you the patina will not come off. I write instead.
Love ya, Mom.
Composed 10.13.2022. De Luxe Bakery. Iowa City, IA.
