Written on August 4th, 2019 and originally posted on Google Docs
With the move, I cleared and removed things that I thought were precious to me. Tonka trucks, Hall Pottery, t-shirts from college, papers from elementary school. The immediacy of the move, one of several repercussions of the divorce, the unexpected atom bomb that exploded in the life of myself, my kids, and my ex-wife, had forced such decisions. Items that were once Treasures were now burdens. They were sent to new homes, to donations and recycling centers, and much discarded as simple refuse.
My blue tonka tow truck, one of my favorite toys as a child, in my possession since I was at least four years old, remains for sale. My ex-wife offering to place them on facebook marketplace. She, already an expert on posting items for sale and recouping lost costs. I was aided with coming to terms with such processes by a conversation with Luther, my AA sponsor, when discussing the urge to collect: That every item in our possession is something for our children to someday discard. What we look at as treasure, because of memory and time, is treasure only to us. These thoughts and memories are not transferable. Our children and relatives, they have their own treasures, often as foreign and confusing to us as ours are to them. Of course, a child’s treasures, to a parent, are different. My possessions, if hoarded and kept, would be resented, save for a pocket knife, or book, or whatever small, most likely insignificant thing their own memory had come to associate with my existence. But a child’s things, especially the possessions of a child who is gone, are something entirely different.
One of my newer friendships is with the parents of my lifelong friend, Daylen, who passed away almost three years ago. Earlier this year, I made a trip, a pilgrimage of sorts, to see them in Friona, TX. I slept in Daylen’s room. Clothes, childhood toys, pictures celebrating childhood, unchanged since his death, since his childhood. A shrine, a clinging to memory that is fading, fading from the very last breath that he drew in a lonely Motel 6, bags of cocaine on the nightstand and floor, his dog, scared and alone, abandoned to his death, huddled in the corner.
I cry for his memory, for the loss of a deep friendship. But my tears are nothing compared to the grief and sorrow of his Mother and Father. Their sorrows rise and fall, stirring like wind on the Texas Panhandle plains, circling them without warning, leaving them, wherever they are; Wal-Mart, church, on a tractor. With no option other than to stop and weep, with their whole bodies, as Jane Kenyon so aptly describes in her poem Three Songs at the End of Summer. As with the men I sponsor in AA, when I think of my relationship with Daylen’s parents, the word ‘sherpa’ seems apt. I share their sorrow. But because Daylen was my friend, and not my son, I am able to rise, when they are not, to hold their hand when their fist wants to remain clenched. I am there for them because Daylen was my friend and I am loyal to my friends. I am there because I see commonality between the sorrow over the loss of their child and the loss of my family, both tragedies occurring within a year of each other. And I am there, for these two people, because after conversation and sharing, and breaking bread together, and crying together, we are friends. I hope, and believe, that I am helpful to them. As they help me.
Contrary to my decisions to discard much of my treasure, I still value them more than ever. But much of what I retain, as treasure, is memory. Perhaps it is watching my parents age, starting to grow feeble as they near 80; or my children, adults now, who no longer need much parenting. Or my current circumstances, alone for significant portions of the day and all of my evenings and nights; alone for the first time in my life. A marriage of 23 years, and a relationship of two, now in my past. My physical treasures: A small library, a collection of albums, and some art, now kept in a small apartment. The family home, our home for 14 years, sold, the keys turned over to a family who homeschools their children and likely believes devils and angels are fluttering about, absolving humans of personal responsibility. That house, itself, an abandoned treasure. The echoes of our children, their squeals of laughter, their pangs of sorrow, just that: Echos. Retained in my memory, but doomed to be lost to time. These treasures are unknown to the family now occupying the two-story house in Keller, Tx. No longer our home, just a house. Just bricks, and drywall, insulation and wiring. But those memories: The death of our beloved family dog, the words uttered as my marriage, our marriage, disintegrated as our oldest prepared to leave for college; my daughter’s laments as she navigated the rough waters of junior high school. Those treasures remain, faintly echoing off the rafters and floors of that house, our former home.
And what of my more distant memories; those from my childhood. What happens to those? Who cares about the random memories and images that enter my thoughts as I navigate the present? Of making a picnic on the front sidewalk with my brother when I was four, and he, at most, three? The plastic cups shaped like cartoonish bears, empty of liquid, we only pretended to drink and eat. That memory has remained with me, who knows why, for all of these years.
Or going on a date when I was 17, eventually parking and walking through a small community cemetery in the countryside east of Brenham, TX. The immediacy and urgency of youth and of young love bubbling up on that evening. A feeling, now that I am approaching 50, I long for, but realize is all but impossible to recover, or recreate.
What am I to do now? I’ve discarded most of my physical treasures, willingly so, but I do not want to do the same with my memories, my thoughts, the brick and mortar of who I am. But what to do? I am alone now. I am a daily mixture of right and wrong decisions, of hope and terror, of feeling that I am on the right path and simultaneously feeling eternally lost. What happens to my treasures when I am gone. What happens to me?
Later on August 4th
I got to dry my clothes in a normal clothes dryer today...not one of those industrial Speed Queens that they have in the apartment complex. I believe my clothes were thankful.
What would I do for nothing? For free? I would write. Therefore, I am a writer.
Sunday, May 24, 2020 at 12:09PM 