Extracting Story from Memory

As I mentioned in my last post, Peter Orner has a shtick. He’ll maybe start with a memory, an anecdote and then weave in family details that then leads to a wider context, perhaps a contemporary perspective. He’ll also tie in a book citation, a detail from something he once read—usually an author that has flown under the radar and deserves to be read or revisited.

For example—every time I pass a rock, the kind left behind as glacial debris, moraine, of which there are many such random big rocks here in the Great Lakes region (I grew up in Ohio) I always remember 1) I live in a post-glacial region, we are formed by our environment, remnants left behind litter our past 2) my sister falling and chipping a tooth on our neighbor’s rock on Princewood Avenue in Kettering.

I don’t know how old she was? Nine, ten, eleven but this incident followed her. Not only did the initial fall leave her with a jagged tooth (it was a permanent one, something that as a kid I always wondered about?? permanent versus what?) but a dentist also deemed the tooth dead.

As you can tell I pondered the mysteries of mortality 1) the rock and how it got to be there in our neighbor’s yard when all around there were no other rocs like it, something or someone powerful  moved it there or left it behind and 2) the whole idea that teeth are dead or alive, the whole idea of permanence. I struggled perhaps at the time losing my baby teeth. My sister’s tooth didn’t look dead, though within a few years it began to take on the look of ivory, not matching the surrounding teeth.

Anyway, we loaded Nancy into the car to take her to an oral surgeon for what I later learned was a root canal and crown.

And, this memory leads me to the gas they give you when having the procedure. I must’ve been told it was laughing gas or that one could be tricked into telling the truth when under the influence. So on the way home in the car I told jokes. I can’t recall her laughing. Then I tried to get secrets out of her. Maybe find out what I was getting for my birthday/Christmas. It was likely summer and she had no idea. She was just out of it, so all my prodding and verbal poking had no effect.

I wish there was more to this story, but now we no longer talk. Not since my sister managed to get me written out of my father’s will, was okay with cutting out me and my older brother from our inheritance. I told myself that life is short and I didn’t need a toxic person in my life—especially one as unremorseful as my sister. It’s been over ten years since we last spoke or heard from each other.

But, the other day I checked on Google Earth and that rock is still there—though I’m sure the neighbors are dead or long moved away. Gray granite that our neighbor’s dad used in the winter as a way to mark the end of the drive, to stop teenagers from rolling up into the yard as there was a curve in the road there, as a guide to help his wife back the long way out of the garage to the roadway. That survivor of the Ice Age of the 60s of re-development in a post-9/11 world where democracy is eroding and climate collapse is imminent where teeth go to die—it still lives.

screenshot taken from Google Earth