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A blog errand has me searching through old photographs, looking through the years, with one type of image in mind.
Of course, I can’t find it. What I discover instead are travel snaps, family group shots, photos of Copper, our sweet doggie, gone these many months. Memories, in other words.
Though I look through many of these photographs easily, I can barely glance at others. Some day soon. But not yet.
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It’s the Feast of Corpus Christi, and in Seville, Spain, a procession of statues and icons on floats is — or, given the time difference, already has — snaked its way down the narrow streets of that wondrous city.
I like to think about the places I’ve been, and this is the day I think about Seville, the air scented with orange blossoms, temperatures near scalding (I almost passed out at the Alcazar), the warren of streets around the cathedral.
We walked to the top of the Giralda, or bell tower, where the city was spread at our feet. It was two years ago. It could have been yesterday.
The women were smiling, posing in a gondola before skiing down a mountain. They wore parkas with hoods. Their faces were glowing.
It’s a photo that found its way into a hospital room yesterday, cheering the patient who would no longer ski down a mountain but who, I hope, took heart from the image and the gesture, a kindness meant to stir up memories of a happier time.
The ability of an image to hearten and inspire … it was on full display yesterday, and I marveled at its power.
(This isn’t that photo, but it’s an old photo that always makes me smile.)
I’m reminded this morning that it’s been 60 years to the day since President Kennedy was shot. The act that defined our country for many years, until the other tragedies came along.
Now there are young adults who were born after 9/11, who have no direct or televised experience of the smoldering ruins or the silent skies.
Time marches on; memories do not. They stay locked in place — in amber, perhaps, or something far less valuable. They define us, as a generation and as a people.
How do we honor them and move on? Only by understanding them, I guess, by realizing the many ways they hold us in their thrall.
A woman enters the tiny chapel and crosses herself. I doubt she saw me notice but I noticed just the same.
The couple in line in front of us can’t take their eyes off each other, are forever touching shoulders, exchanging smiles. She has short hair and dimples. He wears a plaid shirt.
There were hundreds of moments like these on our trip through Scotland last month. Little things I glimpsed that I don’t want to forget. The ephemera of travel.
They are like this section of Hadrian’s Wall, a stretch that runs along a lane that’s currently in use. Here is this historical marvel, traces of a structure built two thousand years ago, and we’re driving along beside it as if it was a 21st-century shoulder.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary. And vice versa.
Do facts matter? How integral are they to the underlying truth? These questions and more were raised in the one-act play “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which I saw last night with journalist friends.
The play and book on which it is based raise all sorts of questions about literary license, rights of authorship and fiction versus nonfiction. But for me it was also a trip down memory lane, as I recalled a fact checker I worked with at McCall’s magazine.
Carmen had a quick laugh and a determined air. She wore well-tailored skirts and blouses, and everything about her was precise, from her sturdy pumps to her tidy bob. When she appeared at my desk with a manuscript covered in red ink and pencil marks I always wanted to slink down into my chair, down, down, down until I could slide under my desk and hide out there a while.
Too late, of course. Carmen knew I was there. And even if she didn’t, she would hunt me down just as she did every fact in every article. I’m not a sloppy reporter, but everyone trembled in Carmen’s wake. In a pre-Internet era, fact-checking was no easy task, but Carmen and her minions made sure that every piece in the magazine was shipshape and gospel-true. There were no questions about the lifespan of those facts.
It’s just serendipity that we’re here the same week as the Garrett County Agricultural Fair. So yesterday we ventured out to see the pigs and cows and sheep and goats (some of us city folks confusing those latter two). There were rabbits, too, long-eared laps and Netherland dwarfs. Plus all kinds of hens and roosters, one of which excited the babies with his loud cocka-doodle-doo.
The carnival rides looked as scary as ever — a ferris wheel that was going around at quite a clip and other contraptions that shake you and turn you upside down. Along the midway, barkers sang their timeless song: everyone’s a winner here.
And then, there was the food: cotton candy, which brought back memories of when I used to make it at the Bluegrass Fair as a teenager, gathering the sugar floss with a paper cone, twirling it around the sides of the machine and handing it to a happy customer. What we didn’t have back then were fried pickles, fried cheese and fried candy bars. So of course, that’s the photo I snapped.
On these warm days I make the deck my home. The morning is for brain work, the afternoon for weeding, watering and, as much as I like to put it off, sometimes for laundry.
Yesterday I sat outside while a hot wind stirred up the scent of crisp, drying dresses and t-shirts — and also provided a little screen from the late-day sun.
Is there a scent more redolent and comforting than that of laundry detergent? I remember my friend Elaine, who lived a few doors down from us on St. Ann Drive. (No, my mother did not name me after our street; they moved there when I was 3 and she had long since named me for her mother, Ann Veronica Donnelly.)
Elaine’s mother, Mrs. Scully, had only an ancient wringer washer (the only one I’ve seen in use before or since) and therefore devoted a day to the scrubbing, rinsing, wringing and drying of clothes. I remember her in loose house dresses with stockings rolled down around her ankles.
The Scully house was one of the few in the neighborhood to boast a basement, and you could enter it from the garage. It was always cool and smelled of Tide. Yesterday, I closed my eyes and imagined I was there.
I just pulled out an old cookbook that falls apart when you open it. There are a few recipes in there I still use, and one of them is the cranberry salad I make at Thanksgiving. It’s a molded salad that involves Jello — yes, Jello! — but goes way beyond church potlucks in its appeal. It’s tangy and elegant, a different way to do cranberries.
This cookbook is a window into my past, a long-ago birthday gift from a friend I still count among my dearest, given to me at a pivotal point in my life, when I was moving back to Lexington from Chicago.
The move was designed to let me try teaching and writing at the same time and see which one “won,” which one I would pursue further. There was no contest, and generations of high school English students are the poorer for it.
Only kidding, of course. It’s I who am the richer for it. And seldom a day goes by that I don’t realize it.
I woke early and padded outside for the newspaper, whose slap on the driveway had provided the final whoosh of my awakening this morning (bobbing as I was on the edge of consciousness and waiting for just such a prompt).
It’s too early for shoes so I walked to the edge of the driveway with bare feet. It’s warm enough for that this morning, though I’ve been known to go barefoot in much cooler temps.
Today when I made my way gingerly to the street I thought about how tough my feet used to be when I was a kid. It took a few weeks every summer to harden the soles, but after that I was off, free to dash out of the house, banging the screen door behind me: no socks, no shoes, just a shirt and shorts and a tan that deepened as the weeks wore on. (This was long before sunscreen and there were precious few trees in the new neighborhood of two-bedroom bungalows.)
Tough feet were a point of pride. They indicated a certain street-smartness — or was it street-hardness? — and they showed that you were inhabiting the summer as you should, making it a part of yourself.
Now my feet are not only stockinged and shod, they are orthoticized (if that’s a word … and my spell check tells me it is not). They are the soles and toes of an adult who works on her bottom — and not on her feet. But they can still remember the freedom they once felt. And I like to think that, deep in their neurons and tissues, they can feel it still.
