The Persistence of Memory

“Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.”

Stephen King

When the stranger arrived, I was in the back of my closet, busy helping Wonder Woman capture the bad guy with her golden lasso. That day the bad guy was Superman, because I didn’t have many dolls as a kid, and my only other choice, Cat Woman, was inherently innocent, because she was a woman.

I heard the doorbell ring.

“Honey go get the door!” I heard my mom yell from the bathroom.

I set down the dolls and trudged to the front door. I yanked on the doorknob with all my seven-year-old strength, and it swung open. The sun was behind the visitor, so at first, I was blinded by the giant shadow in front of me. As my eyes adjusted, I saw only a pair of brown worn pants. They were the biggest, filthiest pants I’ve ever seen, held in place by a cracked black belt. They were still on the other side of the glass, but I could see that these pants – a brown polyester blend -- have travelled. They weren’t ripped yet, but they were worn at the knees and beginning to fray at the cuffs. These pants had stories to tell. I got goosebumps on my arms, already wondering about those stories.

As I looked closer, I saw that the pants were clinging to a giant balloon of a belly covered by an equally tattered button-down plaid shirt. The head on top of the shirt was unfamiliar. It was owned by a towering old man, with a few threads of stringy grey hair that curled menacingly around his ears. I stared up at him, frightened. He scowled back. I resisted the urge to run.

Finally, the man spoke. His voice was full of gravel, as if he’d just eaten a piece of the road he’d traveled in on.

“Is your mother home?”

“Hold on.” My mother had taught me not to let strangers into the house. So I turned and shut the door behind me, leaving the man to bake in the hot July sun.

My mother appeared from her room and followed me down the hall.

As she opened the front door, her face lit up with surprise. “Honey, this is your grandfather!” she yelled with delight.

Grandfather? I had a grandfather? Grandfathers were something other kids had if they were lucky. They were rare, like a pet gerbil or a trampoline in the backyard. This man was supposed to be my grandfather? The idea did not compute. Grandfathers looked like Charlton Heston. They were silver-haired and mustachioed, erect and well groomed. They smelled like a pipe and brought sweets when they visited. They smiled and hugged and sometimes even rolled around with their grandchildren on the floor. I could not picture the giant person at my door doing any of these things.

And he never did.

When my grandfather re-entered our lives after seven years in exile, he was a ruined man. I knew that once, he was a millionaire. Everything about him was large – his body, his wallet, his exotic travels, and, according to family legend, especially his excessive presents. He’d been a man who casually gifted a horse to his daughter, a peacock broach worth several thousand dollars to his wife, who built one of the first and only indoor pools in his home, and who filled his wife’s closets with row upon row of mink coats and stoles.

Somehow since then, although the details of the events and their chronology were never clear to me, he had lost his fortune, divorced my grandmother, and moved from his home in Buffalo to somewhere in far off Texas. He was now living out of his car, which was packed with “antiques” that he travelled the country trying to sell. This transition from patriarch to peddler remains sketchy to me. The adults kept these things quiet, and I didn’t have the courage to ask how he had fallen from grace. But, looking back, I can see that by the time my grandfather finally came home, it was because he had nowhere else to go. He was penniless, unhappy and, apparently, dying. As far as I knew, he had not been in touch with his children or ex-wife in the seven years of his absence. And yet when he returned they welcomed him like royalty. They gave him money, a place to live, three meals a day, and attended to his health needs, which were many. I became preoccupied with his horrifically bloated ankles, which never deflated past the size of an average human skull.

He became a regular fixture in our living room, his hulking body cratering our sofa, his swollen legs elevated, barking marble-mouthed commands to my mother and telling us kids to quiet down – all out of just the corner of his mouth. He was not interested in children, or much of anything, that I could tell. He mainly stayed in the living room. Most nights, he watched the news, then Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, eating his meals off our folding TV trays. Eventually, with effort, he would heave himself off the couch and head back to his apartment, which I never saw.

I learned that he had colon cancer and congestive heart failure, two angry and progressive diseases that slowly ate away at him and eventually took his life a few years later.

My grandfather was a disappointment to me from the moment I met him. I wish I could be more generous in my memory of him, which continues to morph over time as more details are revealed to me. In my mind, he leapt directly from simply a dark void to a loud, large, irascible and dying old man. After he passed away, my grandmother confessed to me that he beat her when they were married. After that, my passive childhood irritation turned to full adult outrage. Still, he never raised a hand to us kids, and since he was essentially immobilized on the couch when I knew him, he never really got in our way, physically. Or maybe that’s how I want to quiet this dissonant chord that threatened my otherwise euphonic childhood.

When my grandfather died, I did not come home for the funeral. When my mother called to tell me the news, I was taking a Napa Valley wine tour with my husband. We were newly married, flush with adventure and discovering the riches of caramel-sweet port. “Don’t come,” she said. “Enjoy your vacation,” she said. “What would you do if you came? There’s nothing to do here.”

I was too young to understand it then, but my mistake still haunts me now. Now I know better, and it seems so obvious: Funerals are not about remembering the person who died. They are about comforting those left behind. I should have come home, regardless of what my mother said. She had lost her father. She did not have the same revulsion and fear of him that I had had. She remembered a father who supported her throughout her childhood and who was generous to a fault. He was a father who showed his love by showering her with gifts, and when he ran out of money for those gifts, he ran away. She told me that once, he even brought home a roller coaster and set it up in the front yard for her, just because he could. He was a father who was lonely and needed her at the end of his life; a patient who had given her an opportunity to be a kind and generous person herself.

My mother was wrong that there was “nothing to do” upon the death of her father. At a funeral, the doing is not the point. It is the physical act of being there – to hold a hand, to greet the visitors, to clear the dishes, to sit quietly and listen to another human’s reinvention of memory. To bear witness to the reconstitution of a childhood, a life.

I could have shown up. By skipping the funeral I created a void by her side, just as my grandfather had created a void in my own young life. Although my mother may have long forgiven both of us for these absences, I have yet to do so.

Memories are funny things though -- maybe all my mother’s happy memories are true. Maybe her childhood was full only of ponies and carnival rides, adventures and riches. They were certainly true enough to her to cast the uglier memories into shadow. Or maybe she really never saw the darker side of her father that I saw. Time has a way of warping these things. Maybe I even had some good times with my grandfather when he came back into our lives. I want to believe that I sat on his lap to read a book together before bedtime. That he tickled me and made me laugh. That we both shouted an answer to a Jeopardy! question at the same time and smiled at each other, proud of our little accomplishment. Maybe those memories are there, or maybe I needed to create them right here on the page, to have something to hold onto. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what is true and what is made up – the past is in the telling of it, after all.

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