what I remember

What do I remember from what came before? Garrison Keillor says we remember things from childhood more vividly than those things that occurred last week. Especially as we age, the things lodged more effectively in the memory are those that have had long to find their place. So what do I remember?

One day when I was five or six I wanted my dad to come play with me. He was on his bed, newspaper spread in front of him. When I asked him to come on out and play he said he would as soon as he finished “this article.” “What’s an article,” I wanted to know. “An article is the word a, an, or the.” Well that is true. Those three words are articles. But why? Why would a grown man tell a six-year-old child, to whom he’s just said “wait till I finish this article,” that this is the definition of an article. Did he, in the ten or fifteen seconds between my first question – “come play” – and my second question – “what’s an article?” – forget that the two questions were linked together by his answer in between? Was he intentionally trying to mess with the kid? Did he somehow think that those three words were the most essential meaning of the word article, such that it trumped having his tiny daughter know what he meant? Did he think I wouldn’t notice that he’d performed a semantic slight of hand? What? What was he thinking?

It’s not as if I didn’t notice the incongruity. In fact, I spent many hours between the moment of his utterance and my learning parts of speech years later wondering how it could have possibly taken him so long to finish reading one of those tiny words. Even if he’d been reading all three of them, how could that have taken the 15 minutes that passed until he emerged from the bedroom for some play? When he did appear, I couldn’t figure out how to articulate a question that would indicate perplexed-ness. I was, after all, only half way through the single digits. But I was terribly confused. And I never forgot it. I never forgot how he absent-mindedly answered me and how I tried desperately to make sense of what he’d said.

That absent-mindedness, I think, accounts for many confused children. A friend told me that she once, at about the same age, asked he mother why, when addressing an envelope, she was supposed to write “New York” twice. Her mother’s reply? “I don’t know.” It seems impossible that her mother really didn’t know. But it was one of those “oh really” answers you give to three-year-olds whose speech is still unintelligible, one of those “don’t bother me,” or “I’m not paying attention to you” replies. Usually those answers rush by in the heat of a thousand a day. But every now and then one lodges in a child’s mind and you can have years of wondering...what did she mean by that?