Memoirous

Riding my bike on Memorial Day I passed many cemeteries dressed for the day. Spruced up. All the old flowers gone, the lawns cut, the gravestones cleared of debris. Ready to receive visitors. That’s how we used to spend Memorial Day as a kid, visiting my grandmother’s grave in Kentucky—and a few others that I could not understand who they were in our lineage. The tradition started as a way to honor those fallen in past wars. Growing up World War II was still somewhat fresh. That was a good war. The Vietnam conflict, never properly recognized as a war, was complicated. We didn’t have any family that had died in war. Dad was a Navy veteran and my mother’s brother had also enlisted and a few other uncles who had married Mom’s sisters. Again, we didn’t need to honor them because they were still alive. Anyway, while visiting grandma’s grave—a person, by the way, that I didn’t feel a great connection with as she had passed when I was a toddler—I would explore the graveyard and read the...

 I remember as a little kid waiting in line for Santa. This is one of my earliest memories so I was very young. I must have been told who Santa was and that he was responsible for bringing my presents. I understood I had a duty to tell him what I wanted. So we showed up at the department store and rode the elevator up. We got off into a cottony world of sparkly snowflakes. We wandered through colored lights and fabricated gumdrops. We winded through what looked like a workshop manned by elves with jingle hats and bells on their toes. It seemed to take forever. Finally we made it to a studio where there was a camera and helpers, and sitting on a throne was a fat man in a red suit with a fake beard. The Big Kahuna. The main event. Santa.  I climbed aboard his lap and whispered what I wanted for Christmas and then it was over. Leaving, I realized that all those places we walked through, Winter Wonderland, Elf Workshop, Santa World was all part of the experience and I had missed...

Stories of a Family Christmas, 1963 1) I loved these pajamas! I wore them until the pants became shorts. I kept the cap, for a favorite stuffed animal. This was the house on Hackney Street in Kettering; I must be about 4, almost 5. Nancy is 6. The metal kitchen set was a shared toy, though I might have appreciated it more. Eventually it got moved to a backyard playhouse where it rusted and one day I opened up the oven door to discover a nest of spiders. After that I never touched the kitchen set. 2) A rare instance of Nancy and I playing together—though to be exact it might be more parallel play. Growing up we were nothing alike. Never one to fall into gender prescribed roles, she was more a tomboy, at home on a basketball court rather than in a kitchen. My sister was a mystery to me. I think today she might be referred to as on the spectrum. Someone with sensory issues. She could not abide clothes with tags on them; they had to be removed. Clothes in general made he...