Do you Remember?

 

Do you remember?

The games we used to play.  Dirt clod wars, Attack the forts,

Hide and seek.

 

Now we play that same game, but it is memories that hide

And we seek.

We seek them out with haste and pressure,

Afraid to be gentle with ourselves lest we slide unabated,

Into the mist of that abyss.

 

I remember watermelon pickles our Grandmother made,

Coming home from Fiddler on the Roof . . .

Our father home from Vietnam

Already wrenching on our beloved Volvo.

 

Just as he had been wrenched from us

We had wrenched him out of Vietnam

Before the goodbye bullet could take him

To an earlier grave then when he died at 66.

 

I remember my brother vanishing in an instant in a scree of gravel and stone

Whirling around to hear that lonely sound of nothing

Nothing to be seen or heard

Rushing, rushing, rushing to the edge of the railroad trestle

And there, down, down, down . . .  he was in such deep soft lovely mud.

It was then I knew that I loved him so fiercely but could not name it

Would not name it because we had not been taught the deeper words.

 

 

I know and love the memory of my grandparents’ house

So quiet and creak, creak, creak went the sound of old steps and older bones

And there hidden in the dim and dusky dusty mist of time and memory,

Lay hanging a dead grandfather’s fishing hat I never knew

No smell of the dead and the hair crème he must have worn.

Its rusted steel and brass hooks still waiting for the bait and bite.

 

The rack upon the wall below the grimy glass held the gas mask and even at the age of 10,

I knew that it reeked of death and misery in its inherent purpose of war.

Could I hear the tortured breath and lungs wracked with mustard gas?

 

Sundays the breakfast day we loved. We loved our mother, our father

The unabashed love of children who love unreservedly until they know.

The memory of waiting for our fathers love put into the pancakes he made . . .

The ‘test’ pancakes, so small and tiny in their perfection.

Better then the real ones we devoured later.

 

Do you remember all this and more?

In the end we have this and nothing more.

Except the love we had, the hands that hold us

The love given, shared and nurtured.

I remember.

 

    David McCullough

    July 22, 2022