Moons Over My Memory

Sundays, my Matilda complex, and the strange holiness of ordinary things.

I think about the neighborhood where I grew up, and how it seemed impossibly large, as if the sidewalks were keeping secrets and the trees were in on them. Childhood has a way of turning ordinary streets into cathedrals and crime scenes at once. When I was a child, every street was charged. I walked through it like a small animal with its fur standing on end. Every front porch carried its own mood. Every lit window suggested a life I could almost imagine but never fully know. I was a nosy little kid. I was always thirsting for knowledge, my nose in a book constantly like a little Matilda clone.

And then there were the other people.

As a child, every adult appeared to have stepped out of some private mythology. Some people entered a room and changed the pressure in it. My father smelled of sawdust and coffee, a faint linger of Marlboro reds, too. My grandmother of garden soil and coffee brandy. The neighbors with their sharp voices, their laughter, their cigarettes burning down to the filter as they talked in driveways after dark. Certain neighbors and friends arrived trailing perfume or engine grease or the cold metallic scent of winter in Maine. Before I knew what charisma was, I understood that people carried atmospheres around them. Some felt like scary thunderstorms. Others like libraries that I wanted to get lost in. I always paid too much attention. I still do.

Even the days of the week had personalities. Not like the pack of undies we all got with the days of the week on them. Monday was stern and gray, nobody quite awake yet, sleepy seeds still in the corners of their eyes. Friday loosened its collar for every adult it seemed, EVEN the nuns (sometimes). Sunday carried that strange, holy melancholy. Catholic beauty and guilt all wrapped into one mass. The feeling of church clothes hung back in the closet and the faint dread of morning. Even when I was a kid, I hated all the small talk that came with church. The mass itself wasn’t really the issue for me. Time was not abstract then. It had texture. It had weather. It sometimes felt like I was in that stained glass fish tank for 10 years, in reality it had only been a fraction of each Sunday morning. All I knew to mark the time was Dennys. We went to Dennys after church every weekend. I’d get Moons Over my Hammy dipped in ketchup and chocolate milk. I remember feeling guilty that that sandwich was my favorite part of Sundays.

The objects in our house seemed equally charged. I remember objects with embarrassing tenderness. A chipped mug that meant something special to my dad, a lamp that was always left on in the kitchen, a stack of old records in which I had memorized the covers, the family Bible with its tissue-thin pages. Children are collectors of talismans. They press meaning into ordinary things until the things become holy. They are archivists without knowing it, assigning great meaning to things because they sense, correctly, that things are keeping track of them.

Years passed, as they do, with less ceremony than you’d expect. One season folded into another. Haircuts changed. Voices deepened. People left. Some returned. Some did not. Looking back, memory resembles an old cedar trunk in the attic; crowded with photographs, odd but comforting scents, and relics whose significance would be meaningless to anyone else. I know I can still technically go up to my Pepere’s attic and sit there with a stiff pour of his favorite peaty scotch, but he won’t be there with me. Maybe I’ll have a Lagavullin 16 tonight in his honor. Mmm.

And then there are the dreams.

I imagined futures. I rehearsed losses. I fell in love with places I had never seen.

Some of those dreams dissolved. Some followed me into adulthood and refuse to leave.

If I’m honest, I still live inside a few of them. The ones that visit at night and the ones I carry around in daylight like contraband. They blur together sometimes. In childhood, the border between imagination and reality is wonderfully porous. A bad dream could stain the morning for but a few seconds; a daydream could rescue an entire week. Fuck, a daydream could last an entire week back then. Life was essentially Technicolor: the horror and the bliss.

Is this what memory really is? I know what it’s definitely not: neat and chronological. It’s closer to a collection of impressions. A smell. A doorway. The particular light of late afternoon on the living room carpet, dappling like magic just when you need it to. The sense that everything was charged with meaning, even when you had no words for what that meaning was.

One day you are a child staring out the car window. Then, without warning, you are a woman doing the same thing, only now you understand what your parents were so silent about.

“Candy Cigarette Girl” Sally Mann

I couldn’t find a proper one from the late 90’s but this is MOONS OVER MY HAMMY. PHOTO FROM DENNYS WEBSITE.