My memory bounces like a needle on a scratchy record. I remember my mother coming home from being out, and the first thing she did was take off that damn girdle; girdles weren’t just girdles, they were damn girdles.

I remember my father in his three-piece suit, cuff links and watch chain and hand-painted silk tie, and I was as proud a son as I could be.

I remember painting my tricycle. I remember breaking my thermos on the first day of first grade. I remember new jeans with the cuffs turned up, and nickel Saturday at the movies.

Pull Quote

‘I remember painting my tricycle. I remember breaking my thermos on the first day of first grade. I remember new jeans with the cuffs turned up, and nickel Saturday at the movies.’

And on a cold winter morning, when the tracings of frost inside my bedroom window lit my eyes and in the early part of the day before the sun, when the snow was fresh and nobody had walked on it, not even the dog — that always seemed kind of holy to me, even when I was too young to be sure what “holy” really meant. And when the snow rested on the boughs of the fir trees and danced in the air and sprinkled on the roof and the first blue sky ran end to end like a paint pot, I thought to myself these are the best, most important colors in the whole world.

When my mother made a fire in the woodstove, when she put our socks in the warming oven, when she made us tarts from the leftover pie dough and filled them with raspberry jam — mothers and warm things, kisses for free and hugs all the time, sack lunches with sandwiches in waxed paper, red runny noses and mittens, an extra blanket at night — that’s what I remember.

If we were told to go outside today and play the way kids play, would we know what to do? The gate to the garden of a child’s world is locked — we were glad once to let it go, but now we’re not allowed to return. I miss that world, the Christmas of my memory, with colored paper rings and popcorn chains and Red Flyer wagons and a neighborhood sweetie named Sylvia. Christmas was green and red and silver and girls with ribbons in their hair and cookies with lots and lots of frosting.

On Christmas night we bobbed for apples at the neighbor’s house (the one with Sylvia), and sang the carols we learned and chased each other round the room. I’m a better person because of that, I’m better because of the Mickey Mouse Club, The Lone Ranger, baseball cards and the Sears Roebuck catalogue. I’m better because our dog had puppies that we sold and my brother and I each got five dollars to buy Christmas presents.

We’re all of us good for what we’ve become and good for what we were. And whether you followed the frosty path that I saw on an early winter morning on my bedroom window, or if you followed your own, it’s all the same and it’s all life. And so I thank everyone I’ve ever known for the memories of my life, except for you, Sylvia, you left me when I was 12, and you never even called.