When my grandfather opened the door, he announced that Santa Claus had appeared, and my sister and I ran to witness the marvel. After dinner that snowy night, someone knocked at the door of their farmhouse. Just after I turned five-the year of Roy Rogers and Jim Brown-my maternal grandparents staged a Christmas Eve celebration. In a third, I knelt beside a little, gray suitcase.Īh, the little, gray suitcase. In another my sister stood on a chair and leaned across the kitchen table to blow out the candles on her cake. In one I posed in a heavy coat at the age of two. When I lifted the box by its corner, dozens of photographs spilled out.Īs I gathered them, black-and-white prints of my sister and me as young children caught my attention. The room was piled with furniture and boxes and out-of-date clothing, but just inside the door the ironing board was stacked with a turkey roaster, a nightgown and blouses, and a dress box cockeyed across it. Sometime, probably in the early 1980s, during preparations for a Christmas dinner at my parents’ house, my mother directed me to retrieve a seldom-used pot from a small bedroom she used for storage. Perhaps most important, at that house outside Celina, Ohio-in retrospect, it feels like a crisp, late fall day-I stood with a football under my right arm and announced that I would grow up to be Jim Brown, the star running back for the Cleveland Browns. We moved from that house in 1956 before I turned five in November, the same year I witnessed Roy Rogers perform at the Ohio State Fair in August. I do not remember hoisting a gallon milk jug up our rear concrete steps and tripping nor biting the doctor’s finger as he stitched my lower lip. Electricity etching the outline of a chimney on an elderly couple’s kitchen wall when lightning struck a tree outside their house. The storm that gripped our house in crackling lightning and thunder pounding on my bedroom windows. A church ice cream social staged on our front porch featuring a family singing group, complete with organ, and with light bulbs strung across the front yard deep into the night. The backyard arbor in which I plucked Concord grapes and ate them straight from the vine. He grunted, bent over, in carrying it to our car.Īnd more. When my mother asked why I was crying, I said, “It’s so sad.” And before that: my father’s picking up that very television from my paternal grandparents after they had purchased a new one. Lying on the sofa during a fever and watching a ballet on our hand-me-down television. I easily located those memories in the first house I lived in. I had always been able to recall with accuracy events dating back to when I was two and three and four years old.

I eventually crawled into bed and apologized to my wife, and she mumbled a sleepy acceptance. The truth about that night remains at issue. But do not forget the issue of memory here or the related issue of truth, or as much of the truth as we can corral. There, in my own handwriting I read of an argument, a vague reference to an apology, and her assurance that I should have no concerns over the kiss.įorget for a moment right and wrong, fidelity and jealousy, and the tribulations of any marriage. But after she returned to bed, I retrieved my journal. No apology could exist from an argument that had never occurred. “If you don’t believe me, check your journal.

A month ago when we had this same argument.” “You’ve done no such thing,” I said, or words to that effect. When nothing she said assuaged my anger, she asked what more I wanted. I apologized but maintained my righteous indignation over the kiss. She castigated me for violating her privacy but admitted that she had expected such a breach of trust from me for some time. Evidence from her journal suggested that she and our friend were becoming much closer, I countered. I had nothing to worry about, she insisted. I accused her of flirting with infidelity. When she found me and asked what bothered me, I denounced the kiss, and the argument I had imagined ensued. Incensed, I located her journal, paged to the time of the kiss, and studied subsequent entries for evidence to confirm my suspicions. For more than an hour I rehearsed my grievances and imagined my wife’s rebuttals. I stole out of bed, tiptoed downstairs, and paced our study in a froth. I awoke, sweating, in the middle of a summer night, my anger swelling. Months later in a new apartment, I said something. I said nothing and helped his wife on with her coat when she appeared from the powder room. As their lips remained engaged, I retreated into the bedroom, cleared my throat, paused another beat, and re-emerged. In early 1987 my first wife’s lips lingered in a long goodbye on those of a close male friend as I emerged from the bedroom with two winter coats, one his, one his wife’s.

Heisenberg principle of remembrance