I thought I couldn’t slow down any more than I had, but I was wrong. Now taking late morning naps. Not a good look when my wife is working her ass off, too busy to hang her clothes. The house has a harried look and I work to restore it. But it’s like a sand castle; it gets rebuilt and destroyed every 12 hours. Lily came home from college for the weekend and both kids have shopping carts full of books everywhere. So much reading, so much work. Me, I’m just the cook. And the lawn service. Soon I’ll be working again too and then I’ll miss all this.

Somehow the season knows right when to cut over to fall and somehow that surprises me every year. Driving back to the west side of the state with Lily you could see the foothills in the distance with a thick line of clouds hanging over them, the partition between east and west. And the beginning of the fog, the muted greens and browns.

I tried telling Lily stories from my college years but bungled the details and realized my past is getting away from me. Then I did the math: thirty-six years old, that memory. The one about a friend I met in college and his sister. Or the one about another friend, the time we got stranded in the desert camping. I know the key points but trip on the execution. It’s like it didn’t happen.

We were touched by the fact that Lily wanted to come home, but seeing her boyfriend was probably the real reason. I tried to humor myself that it was more than that: the home-cooked meals and comfort of her own bed, our new kitten Timmy. Maybe coming home was a way of repeating all the good memories of youth, of holding on in a sense. It’s why I went back to the same restaurants or walked the same walks, rehashing the best of my past. I tried to do that with my favorite stories, as if the retelling kept them alive.

What was it about repetition? Was it a way of reinforcing our own realities or sense of control? Was it the underlying motive behind storytelling, to preserve the past as we wanted it to be known?

I couldn’t remember the lead-up behind that night with my friend and his sister but I had the main elements: I’d met the two of them independently of each other and invited them both to a party. Neither knew the other was going, or that they each had an acquaintance in me. The girl had made a cassette of a record for me and I liked her. So had her brother (the same tape). They were both baffled at the sight of each other, as was I, to learn they were siblings. I hadn’t told the story much, so the details had fallen away. When I tried to access it now most of it was gone.

Maybe we go back to those times to relive that feeling for a minute. It’s why I traveled and backpacked, to give myself something worth talking about. In the absence of epic tales you could try to find meaning in the everyday banal—it was always there—but it was hard not to lapse into journal writing. Still the journals would help preserve the memory.

With it coming on fall I went back to my favorite autumn recipes in that old cookbook by Jacques Pépin. I wrote notes in the margins and dated them, more for prosperity: often in mid-September I cooked the pork and beans stew, the tomato zucchini gratin, or the macaroni beaucaire with sautéed eggplant. Cooking those dishes again was like reliving the past. The memory of how it tasted, consumed again in the present, still alive.

And then there were the memories I couldn’t stop repeating in my dreams. The one about my last day working at Starbucks I’d rather forget. Why does my mind keep repeating that? Am I stuck? Trying to rewrite it? Or does my mind want to change the memory so I can heal and move on?

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, memory