SURROUNDED BY SHAPES, experience registers in the sensual details of every day. First memories come from a haze of sudden image flashes. There were knees, my mother's bare legs. And a yellow dress covered her extended middle. The TV related men with guns, others in their lives or on foot in a foreign land and correspondents grey on the RCA screen—Vietnam. The carpet in the living room was golden, and I'd sit, running my hands on the rough texture. These are quick brush strokes. Of being in a car with my father. Of holding my twin brothers that first day home from the hospital. Posed, no doubt, for their camera, subject to the parents' will. Who were those creatures? And again, memory fails, goes out, black. Cells store the past, and then some object or image releases it. Or it's a quality, a resistance inside me, retained by my antipathy to those first scenes. Nothing vivid about it at all. It's like a smudge of color, a sullen act or refusal in the coercive field of others. Awareness grows from this internalized difference, that you won't submit to another's formal appetite. What painful acts of memory get carried against the house, car, trees and each other. The gardenias blossomed with strong fragrance each spring and there were bees in the honeysuckle in the alley behind the garage where I recall a remote region of flora, trashcans, cracked asphalt and peeled paint. Dogs barked. Men dumped their lawn clippings.
Posted by Dale at April 29, 2004 04:21 PM