Tag: memory

Memory offers a second chance

‘Losing a person could make more of us. Make two,’ writes Ocean Vuong when he reflects on the death of his loved one. Is this true? Could it be so? When you lose a person you have the person you once knew or you have a new someone, a person now dead. Is this what Vuong means? Or something else altogether. There is the actual person and then there is the person no more. A memory.

Memory offers us a second chance. Vuong again. This makes sense. Memory as a second chance to have a stab at something we once lived through that changes almost every time we remember. The curves and cadences shift ever so slightly along with our emotions about this memory, they soften. The way reading a book can introduce us to characters with whom we might have little affinity but with whom we begin to experience with lashes of empathy because the writer has taken us into the shoes of this person and for once, if only briefly, we see through their eyes. 

Even if they are a person filled with self-loathing because of life’s cruelties, we do not despise them the way they hate themselves. If anything, we can urge them to be kinder to themselves in the theatres of our imaginations where anything is possible.

Weather, too, gives us second chances. It’s April in Australia and the seasons are turning with the red leaves about to drop brown and crinkled on the ground. I gather my woollen jumpers and shake them from their summer sleep. 

I have a day of visitors mapped out today. A small grandson who will doubtless play along with whatever toys he can find. We might go to the movies and later, a sister who is troubled as one of her children is seriously ill. Different people and different moods and I will adapt to each as required.

My husband and all four daughters are attending a ceramics class in Fitzroy today. Each wanting to try their hand at creativity of a different form. Each keen to experiment with clay. One son in law reminds me, when he was a school kid he despised art classes involving cay. He hated the feel on his hands. The way the stone drew moisture from his fingers and palms. The sensation of dryness as if friction on his skin. 

I know what he was talking about. I have the same sensation in my mouth when eating scones. Something about the mixture of flour to moisture draws moisture from my mouth. My teeth grow sticky and the taste, however pleasurable, is subsumed by the sensation.

There are those who might suggest such sensibilities be speak to a person who struggles with neurodiverse behaviours but these are the thin edge of diversity. We all have our peccadilloes. Not always problems but sources of great joy.

And possibility. A second chance.

Scuffed skirting boards

‘I hate the smell of other people’s lives,’ says Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s creation, when faced with the prospect of moving into someone else’s house to escape New York into Maine during the Covid pandemic.

Instantly my nose twitches. Not so much at the thought of other people’s lives – by which Lucy means the smell of their lives as it radiates through their houses – but at the smell of my own house, over one hundred years old and tired.

It can give off the dank smell of mildew and decay. Especially now that autumn’s cold is setting in and I’m too mean to use our ancient gas central heating for fear of the unspeakable costs every quarter. 

It’s not just the life of me and mine that seeps through the bones of this house, but the lives of our predecessors, those who lived here during the first half of the 1900s, when this area was more industrial, and miners’ cottages flanked the side streets.

This house, large by comparison, was occupied at one time by a doctor who used our front room as his surgery. After he sold the house they split it, one flat on either side of the corridor, to create homes for two families.

The back of the house when we bought it in 1980, consisted of two separate lean two kitchens and bathrooms. We pulled them both down to make room for one proper bathroom and kitchen. 

If I do not die here I will be sad to say goodbye. For all its foibles this house has served us well.

Death tricks my mind into thoughts of my father.

If I could meet him, now long dead, and had courage enough, the courage of my age and understanding today, I might ask him, 

‘What were you thinking to treat us the way you did?’ And in my impossible meeting into the future, he might say. 

‘I wasn’t thinking. I was compelled. Driven by dark forces within me that hark back to a time when I felt as helpless as a kitten and could only fend for myself by scratching or lashing out.’

My imaginary father of the future is poetic. My actual father was not. 

The paint peels on the walls of my memory and the skirting boards are scuffed with the marks of too many feet in shoes bashed against them as people walk by.

Funny how memories like this eclipse all others. They cast a shadow over your life and like rising damp bring out a mould of black, to which some can be allergic.

My body bears such scars, and my mind is streaked with the mud of memories as they throw up more mud. I cannot get a foothold on dry land.

You find yourself thinking, I must not speak about this. It might be contagious, like a virus, or it might lie like a damp dishcloth over your heart exuding such a stink it stays on your fingers for hours. 

All the metaphors I can find do not do justice to the dull ache of memory as it thrums its way into my vision. 

All the words evade me, only the smell remains.