from Startles

     

She still has a sense of humor, but it’s about what she’s forgotten. Pills, tea, breakfast, dinner, dogs, where the blanket is. Dog takes her blanket; she takes her daughter’s. She wears aviator sunglasses while she sleeps. When we say we want now, we know we cannot have.

A walk in the museum, on the lane in Volcano, a dinner she makes for us, tug of war with my dog. On occasion, that happens, but less. Lessness is a moving state. The slots in Vegas clink; your memory is money, and it slips away, coin by coin by coin. What’s the fuss about Trader Joe’s, I wondered, when we drove there from the airport.

If you give me some words, I’ll give you back others. It’s called a conversation, and it no longer happens. Words become other words. The rest of us count cliches during the ballgame. She tries to read words on the screen, like corruption, but that’s too long.

Memory corrupts in the way orange plastic on a cone tears and fades. The cone still marks a space not to go beyond, or through, but its fading is a weariness. Stuck through the broken cone, I see a metal pole lodged at an odd angle, and grass. Beyond the cone, a van, two ankles and feet behind it. A good photo, albeit with a different lens.

My mother understood the shapes of stories, their set up, what they required to move ahead, the striking funny detail, and then the punch at the end. Not a line, perhaps, but a startle. Of course the man ran away when she showed up with the chaplain. Of course the pilot disappeared after his girlfriend gave him the wrong answer. Of course she governed the dinner table.

Take a small one out of the memory pen, leash it, and take it out to play. The small memory, the one you never thought to mark, wanders like a dog across the yard, aiming for the fences where the best smells are. Today, Lilith flushed a mongoose out of grass beneath a tree; her nose went in one way, mongoose ran around the back. She saw she’d missed it, and I saw that she saw, though I let her pull forward. The artificial hunt is what she’s permitted.

I tried to explain voluntary and involuntary memory to my Italian teacher in Italian. I hadn’t forgotten the words, for I never learned them. Not yet. But we parsed the difference between object and fact and the creation of a world out of mind and air. I remember some of Marcel’s memories, but not the actual plot. Hoku’s now in charge of putting down flags that mark each cemetery plot.

What if hope were located in the past? Would loss still devastate? What would we grieve, then? The future we no longer need? The gnome on an imagined car hood, shadowed in broken glass?

 

--on my mother's birthday, October 25.