Memories Where You Can Find Them
The VHS box set of “Star Wars.” I bought that for her for Christmas.
The first video games he ever lobbied to get for Christmas. I bought those, too.
The Care Bears that I stood in line at frigid Christmas time, with tons of other parents, to “win” for her special gift.
Oh, and there were the “My Little Pony(s),” all the accessories, and how about those “Cabbage Patch Kids?”
Those CD’s by people with names like “Vanilla Ice.”
They’re all in my house now. Some of them are visible every day. Some are packed away in the attic. I either pass or come across them every day, in my travels here at the home where our “kids” were raised.
I called it a “home.” Actually, now it’s a house. That’s a downgrade.
When did that happen? I guess around the time our daughter and son “grew up.”
Sure, they still come to visit, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes longer, always for holidays, at least for now, with or without a spouse or “other.”
I wonder for how long.
The rest of the time I walk by this stuff they left behind and see how much more was left behind. So much more.
Some of it is just “stuff.” Some of it is more, much, much more.
There are the baseball gloves, his and mine. They correspond to the patch of lawn where we played catch in a time that seems not so very long ago. But it was.
There are the photos of the pets, long gone, in each of their bedrooms. Why do they keep those?
And why am not able to avoid looking at them each time I walk in and out of their rooms to raise shades or lower windows?
Old technology abounds. There’s the boom box that once was state-of-the-art and its sibling, the Walkman.
I pledged I’d get rid of all this stuff last summer. Or, was it the summer before? Or is it every summer since they “grew up”?
When my mom died nearly eight years ago, my dad, now 94, told my sister and me that nothing was to be touched in his house. He wanted it exactly the way it was when my mother left us.
That seemed an old man’s clinging to something long gone, something that can’t be retrieved, a time that can’t be brought back.
A fool’s gold.
It seemed that way.
But then, I became that man.
What would seem to others like scrap is my gold.
It is a touchstone on a time and of a time.
It is a window to memories that shouldn’t depend upon an object, and yet they do.
These objects—all of them—are markers, reminders that this once was a home.
Now it’s a house.
The difference may not be measurable, but it is palpable.
And it brings me, as a father, closer to my own.