I think I made up memories. Really. Is that something someone would do? The river, too blue to be a river and the sun making photographs of places, each place different mainly because the sun shone differently,.
The sun, for instance, in Youngstown in 1968. It's never shown like that anytime else. And there's the photograph. Johnny is not in the photograph, but he's nearby -- my parents, too, somewhere around. We'd been somewhere and now we were here, here being the front yard of a two-story yellow house on Oak Hill Avenue, just down from a store that may have been Lawsons or may have been the Big D. (It was awhile ago -- I was 15 -- I'm 61 now, but the time of year is the same).
The sun took the photo and it was a selfie, so I'm not in it and Johnny's not in it and my parents are not in it and the house is only in it by default, a little to the side of what I'm sure is a tree, though I don't think there was a tree in our yard at all, and that's why I think I made up memories.
What are we doing here? You. Planting your garden and harvesting and eating -- why? You. Building boxes to put books in and washing clothes and planning toward the weekend. We were in the city. Sun was relentless, usually, but not in that selfie in the front yard in 1969. Pathos. It means able to evoke sadness. That moment wasn't sad, though. Somehow, it is superimposed over the fact that there was a Viet Nam war. But it was the sixties. Everything was overcast. We painted flowers on things. I painted a flower on my cheek, embroidered one on my best shirt, drew them in the margins of notebook pages.
Next year, I would be in a different house and in a different state of mind. The sun would never be as yellow, spill as much butter honey on things as at that moment before I walked inside. Inside, the house would be ordinary. We would be too, if we weren't us. I think I thought Johnny would be drafted.
We moved to the other side of town and away from my best friend who waited for me to open the front door because. My new best friend, on the other side of town, bought things when she wanted them and I was in awe, but not jealous. We discovered Buffey St. Marie and James Taylor. I understood more about the war. We walked, one February, so far that we lost our way back and ended up in town, (though we'd been walking the opposite direction). We bought a magazine called Blue Highways. I thought of travel. The city was squat and ugly, though there were stories.
One night, there was rain and thunder in the middle of the night. I sat at my open window and watched the rain pile up in front of the other store -- whichever one it was. I got a job and graduated and bought a ticket and moved to another state. My uncle sold me a house for $2,000. I was nineteen. What I remember is the bus ride. A girl in a burlap dress and her boy/man in barefeet and the baby, wearing only a cloth diaper, in a sling on her back and the way the boy (he wore a green shirt that said superman) kept stepping up on the curb to look into buses as they pulled up, waiting for the girl. (The baby would be 42 now). They unloaded bikes and he put the baby on his back and they rode off together and I think there was rain, or it was after the rain. The street was shining with light the way it had from my window that other night. I was sure, seeing the three of them, that there was a tribe somewhere. But I was going where I was going and I didn't have a bike and I couldn't follow them. That night, it was the rain taking a selfie, catching these strangers I loved in the photograph. I read, in the bus stop magazine, "No man is an island." I was sure someone had gotten that wrong.
In my journals, the ones I always wrote by hand, some days I'd stop time, saying: "Right now...." and describe the moment.
Right now, the sun is shining. I just came back from a long walk to the other side of town. The town is ugly and squat, but the sun is shining. It doesn't want to take a selfie. The air has to be crisp and there has to be shadows. I should mention that we have a garden and it is weeded and things are growing well. I should mention that the roof doesn't leak and the neighbors are strangers whose names I know, and whose arguments I can hear from my front porch. I should mention that I have friends and that some of us share a belief system that is not the mainstream belief system. I should mention I haven't been truly hungry in ages and that I weigh 117 lbs. I should mention I don't know why we're here. Not here in this town, I mean here at all. I remember other people who were here who aren't now. Were they done? Supposing we're here to learn and experience things, did they leave because they'd learned it all and experienced everything they were meant to? If we're here to grow food and eat it, then we're doing well.
The sun on the river road -- I might have been ten -- the sun shines at that place that time of evening in August now exactly as it shown at that place that time of evening in August then. I didn't make that up. Some things don't change. The sun still takes selfies and sometimes, shows them to us and we remember.
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