Permanent Memories
Stephen Bush
After hitchhiking west towards the cost I turned south on California Hwy 1. The ocean was breathtaking. Not one car went past to disturb my walk. After going through a small village I headed east up a narrow road back into the mountains. The sun was setting quickly into the distant ocean and a heavy fog was rolling in. I turned off the mountain road into the timber to find a place to sleep. Scooping leaves and forest litter into a depression in the side of the hill, I made myself a bed. After unrolling two wool blankets to further insulate me from the ground, I crawled under an old poncho someone had given me. Lying on my side, I watched the last bit of light fade into perfect darkness. A light rain began to fall. I pulled the poncho over my head and waited to be overtaken by sleep.
Cold and damp greeted me in the morning. I lay there for a moment watching the fog; it was thick as smoke and the cold soaked deep into my flesh. The morning light was beginning to penetrate the treetops. The only thing that over whelmed the cold and damp was the hunger that welled up from the pit of my stomach. It reached out to numb my very thoughts. Hunger was my constant companion in those days.
Rummaging through my pack for something to eat, out came a small sack of flour, some sugar, a tin of lard, and a can of commodity chicken. I opened the chicken, sat cross-legged on the ground and wept as I ate it with my fingers. It was Christmas morning, 1970. I was nineteen, homeless, and alone in the mountains of Northern California.
After rolling up my blankets and hiding my pack in a hollow redwood stump, I found my way back to the road and headed for town to see what I could see and find what I could find. The air was clean and crisp; there was a trickle of clear cold water running in the ditch. Kneeling down, I washed the chicken off of my hands. I scooped several handfuls of the icy water to my mouth and washed my face. How alive and mystical the whole world seemed. It was like a fairyland everything was wet and glistening and the air was so clean. In that moment I was glad to be alive.
Reaching Hwy 1, I turned north and slowly walked to words town. West of the road was an open field that led down to the cliff overlooking the ocean. On the east was a pasture that ran up the hillside to the forest. A large whiteface bull fell into step with me on the east and we walked together in silence for half a mile or so until he ran out of pasture.
It didn’t take long to make some acquaintances in town and I found myself house sitting for a lady who wanted to go to the city to see her husband who hadn’t been able to come home for the holidays. It was nice to have a roof over my head even if it was only for a few days.
The house to the south of where I was staying was rented by the week to tourists and people from the city that wanted to taste rural life. A Physicist and his family where renting it that week, he was preparing to go to Japan to work on the high-speed bullet train. They had two sons about my age and we became friends.
New Years Eve was approaching and one of the son’s girlfriends came up from the City for the family celebration, and they invited me to join them. I was grateful for the invitation, I had been baking cookies every day in order to entice my new acquaintances over to sooth my loneliness. The old house had been pretty quiet with just the cats and me. There was no TV and we were too far from a radio tower to get anything except a classical station and that only occasionally.
I arrived early for the party. The house was furnished in early American Goodwill style; all the furniture was old and nothing matched. Every chair in the house was crowded around the dinning table, and the sounds of family filled the air.
Toward the end of the meal the conversation turned to science, and the girlfriend asked the obvious question given that it was New Year’s Eve. “Why leap year?” The physicist smiled slightly and started into a very detailed explanation about the formation of the calendar, the relationships of the planets and the stars, and how one of the early Popes had a room built in the Vatican with a hole in the wall and marks on the floor to chart the start of each season. Then, after several years the marks on the floor didn’t work out right any more. So they started looking at the way the planets related to each other and the sun, moon and the stars and the way they had always measured time and the calendar. The more he talked, the smaller and more insignificant I felt. By the time he was finished, I had came to the conclusion that I was less then a microbe on a grain of sand careening through the vast reaches of space.
When the time came for me to excuse myself I said my thank yous and made my way to the door. I was reticent to head back to the cloistered loneliness of the house next door where my reluctant companions, the two cats, would lie in the shadows watching my every move but never become my confidants. I stepped out on the porch to be greeted by the brilliance of the night sky. There was no moon and the closest street light was miles away. The darkness rapped it self around me. I stood there transfixed for a long moment frozen by the very sight of it. The stars were brilliant; it was like a blanket of black velvet glistening with 10,000 diamonds. I was paralyzed, and even now these many years later I only need close my eyes, take a deep breath and in an instant I return, transported through time and space and I am confronted by the smell of the sea air, the crispness of the cold winter night and all the emotion that held me motionless gazing up at the stars.
There was birthed deep within in me that night an emptiness that impacted my wanderings for years to come. So the question arises. What do we do with permanent memories? Memories are an inescapable part of our lives. We revisit them from time to time, and as we get older, we begin to savor them. And if we pay attention after a time, we begin to understand how these frozen moments add together with our reactions to them and your choices because of them to flavor and season our lives.
Some frozen moments are mountaintops. Like watching my children’s faces appear in this world for the first time. Slowly at first only the tops of there little heads and then they are suddenly here, their little bodies all red and wiggling.
Some are valleys, fearful places, dark and terrifying. Like the night my sister and I sat on the floor in the hallway across from my wife’s hospital room. We watched her heart monitor as it grew silent and her life slipped away. She lay there motionless as the tears rolled silently down our faces.
These memories are foreboding places, places to be avoided at all cost. We fight them off with all our strength but they still overtake us from time to time. Then with courage and the help of those close to us, we can, if we choose to, begin to visit them as well. Slowly and tenderly at first with many tears and much emotion, we approach them like little children afraid of the dark.
Now that I’m getting older I have began to stand guard over all my memories, the happy and sad. I try to guard them against the sands of time for fear they will be worn away like the pyramids. I have come to recognize that they are all woven together, the good the bad and the ugly, to make me who I am. My hope is, they can teach me their lessons as I continue to grapple with the emptiness, whose voice rings in my ears still from time to time. But I have begun to hear it with different ears.
When I was a boy, hungry and alone, I believed I was unloved and abandoned, that even God had turned from me. I stood on that porch in the night looking up at the stars and saw only the vast emptiness of space and couldn’t imagine the universe to be anything but a cold, hungry and a lonely place. I cried out “What importance can I have? How could I matter? How could anyone care about me?”
One of the world’s foremost scientists had explained an aspect of the universe I previously hadn’t understood, and I walked out into the night, looked up into the heavens and saw emptiness and darkness. Beauty and wonder didn’t exist for me in that moment.
I have begun to recognize also that all these memories that can seem so foreboding can be transformed. Like the night in the hospital with my sister, it is a permanent memory that at one time haunted me. Now it’s not only one of many memories I carry of my first wife but it’s also a memory of my sister. Everyone had gotten tired and gone home everyone but my sister. She couldn’t bear to leave me there to go through that night alone. I have begun to hold the memory of that night in the treasury of my heart for both of these women who have been such a big part of my experience.
We move through life, it unfolds before us. Our days come and they go and we accumulate an inventory of memories and these are the building blocks of us.
