Tell me, mom. What do you remember?

 

Vintage photo on Pinterest

“Remembering is mental time travel.” ~Endel Tulving

Stream of consciousness, longhand writing triggers memories, excavating them layer by layer, and if you resist the urges to interrupt the flow, to worry about grammar and syntax, if you just WRITE, 

some amazing insights and recollections will emerge. One thing will always lead to another.

The following excerpt is an edited version of a prompt I received this week during 

the first day of a six-week creative writing workshop, and as such is richly experimental in nature.

Prompt: "I remember..."

I remember a time, a table, a table in the round, and round the circle the wooden chairs went. Chairs with seats mere inches off the floor, chairs that held the body and bones and brains of a new generation. Chairs that scraped up against the linoleum floors of my elementary school. School days I faced the door, a door leading out to a hallway, a hallway leading to the unforgiving playground where my limbs never got the climbing, the running, the hopscotching quite right.

My mom remembered, and I remember my mom, my mom who told me once, once or more, about that classroom, a classroom whose vision is clouded by time, blurry like a cataract. But mom, my mom remembered, she remembered to tell me, and how I wish today, and I'll wish forevermore, that I'd asked, queried, plumbed the depths of 92 years of memories, hers somehow more intact than mine. I remember, my mom remembered to tell me, "You were part of a group, a group of kids who were good writers. Your teacher singled you out." How many kids, who knows now, tapped to write creatively, and at what age? Seven, eight, nine, no, not nine, by nine, I would have been too scared, too scarred by all the dizzyingly dysfunctional drama at home. Home life with a screaming father, drunk on beer and melancholy, so I must have been six, or seven, or eight, no, not 8, not 6 either. I'll bet 7. I'll bet 7 years old for sure. 

Second grade, at that school where I went, Ellen P.. Hubbell, the one I went to when we moved to Fifth Street in Bristol, after we got kicked out of the apartment on Union Street. In Bristol where there was a whole block of streets named after numbers--First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth. I wish I could call mom, my mom, and say, "Hey, mom, remember, do you remember Fifth Street? Remember all the streets that had numbers in their name? What street number were we? I remember Gloria who lived on the other side of the duplex. Remember her, mom? Remember how she turned yellow from the cancer drugs they dripped into her? I remember, so how old were we, mom, how old was I, when we moved to Fifth Street? I remember too, mom, going to the other school, the one I walked to with older kids. I know I was older, mom, because I had my first crush on a boy. I still remember the delicate blonde-haired boy; I remember his name: Jay Prikocki, and I still remember his phone number, the one I used to dial and hang up: 203-583-7915. That's crazy, mom. Over sixty years later, I still remember a boy's phone number. We used to walk, leave that school and walk to a lunch counter, to eat hotdogs, I must have been a pre-teen, or in my early teens. And then high school, mom, walking in the opposite direction still from Fifth Street to Bristol Eastern, so did we live on Fifth Street for ten years, mom? 

Tell me, mom, what do you remember?