Memory

Six years before her death, my grandmother had a minor stroke. She was a fighter, my grandmother. She didn’t allow it to faze her in the slightest.

But after that, her memory began to slip. The timeline got jumbled. She couldn’t always recall who she had had lunch with that day, or who she was speaking to on the phone, but she remembered exactly the sight and smell of each tree in her backyard in the 1920s. The older she got, the clearer these childhood memories became. Time can be funny that way.

She was born and raised in India, although British by blood and citizenship. My mother, British by blood and citizenship, spent the majority of her life in America. I am proud to come from a line of traveling women. I am proud to be one of them. Oh, what adventures we’ve had.

At 84, my grandmother started to forget them, and then rapidly began to share the ones she hadn’t. She recognized what was coming, something perhaps more fearful than death, the understanding that time would much too quickly drain from her all that she had spent her life storing up.

Memories are precious things, even the bad ones, the painful ones. They are the stories that remind us of who we are. They are the foundations upon which we build. They are all that we can really be certain of in the end. They are the sum of a life.

I understood why my grandmother, learning that she could not cling to them forever, wanted to set them free. I understood her urge to tell them. I understood her desire to write poems. I understood that all of it was a means of survival, a small hope for immortality. She was a fighter, my grandmother.

And so I listened patiently to what she had to say, whether it made sense to me at the time or not, whether it made any sense at all. It all seemed important – the route she took to school each day, the feel of her first bathtub, the fragility of her mother’s china bookends, the scent of Indian trees. All of this meant something. All of this, somehow, equaled a life. All of this was my grandmother.

When she was 90 and at the very edge of death, and unable to recognize me without some considerable concentration, I remember thinking, maybe this is how it’s supposed to be. Maybe our memories really do come full circle that way. Maybe we reach a certain point in life when we begin to clean out the attic of our minds, taking down each box and going through the things we’ve stored there, piece by piece.

Maybe in our final moments, we are not seeing our lives flash before our eyes, but only this one final piece, this first piece we decided to store oh so many years ago, this first image of memory that has also become our last. Maybe we build it all up only to one day take it down, clear it out, share it with others so that it may be stored in their attics, in their minds, long after we have gone from this earth.

My grandmother felt her memories slipping, and so instead of losing them, she gave them to me. And I packed them up and stored them away. I carry them with me. I share pieces of them with you. In this way, nothing is lost. No one is lost. Our stories save us. We endure.

When death finally arrived, my grandmother stopped fighting. She simply sighed into its embrace, like an infant in its mother’s arms – without memories, without struggle, just calm, and clear, and ready for adventure.

Under The Big Top

Some days I want to run away and join the circus. It’s a romantic idea, isn’t it? To hop on a caravan and leave everything behind. Most of my childhood summers were spent this way, travelling from city to city with my family, feeling wild and adventurous and free. Wanderlust was instilled in me at a very young age. It’s not the sort of thing that ever goes away. I will always be just a little bit restless.

I will always have a longing inside of me, as large as an elephant, as ferocious as a lion. It calls to me at idle moments. It announces itself as the next exciting act. It blazes open and I swallow the fire whole. It burns.

It is a juggling act, this desire to escape, and hold on, and be content. One of them is always in the air, just out of reach. One of them is always the thing I want to catch when my hands are already full of the other two. There are requirements for running away. You have to be brave. You have to be comfortable with uncertainty. You have to be willing to leave everything behind.

And I’m not. I have built my foundations for a reason. I have settled into a life because I find safety in stability. I need a net beneath the tightrope. I am clumsy. I routinely fall.

I need things to catch me – friends and family and a home and a job and those daily routines and obligations. I need a sense of purpose. I need a consistent act.

Without it, there are no soft, caressing landings. There is only the terrifying emptiness of nothing to cling to, the shock of impact on the hard, merciless ground. There are only broken bones and no one to attend to them. There is nothing to hold on to when I’m trying to get back up.

Still, I will always be just a little bit restless. I will always hear that distant big band playing in my heart. There will always be a part of me that wants to run through the old untamed fields of this world, looking for adventure under the big top tent of the sky.

There will always be a circus inside of me, full of clowns and performers and tamers of those scary, hungry lions. I will try more than once to become ringmaster, to have control over the entire wild troupe. But the acrobats will flip and twist more than I expect them to. They will arrive unannounced. They will frighten the elephants who will trumpet madly in surprise. The sound will throw the tightrope walkers off balance. They will fall. The audience will gasp.

And I will dream in that moment of running away from the circus, of leaving it all behind. I will romanticize the way it would be nice, some days, to just be an ordinary person with ordinary routines and obligations. I will long for time to just sit, unmoving, in the quiet comfort of a place that feels like home. No props, no elephants, no lions, no tightropes, no announcements, no acts. Just me and the safety net of my contentment.

In Praise of Feet

I didn’t begin walking until much later than the other children. I seemed perfectly content to sit and watch my peers toddle around our preschool classroom, or so I’m told. My parents worried, as parents do, that I appeared to have no interest in becoming independently mobile. It has been a continuing theme throughout my life to only make moves when I feel it’s right. I’m always waiting for my moment.

I took my first steps in England. There was no stumbling, no uneasiness to it. I in no way resembled a fawn learning how to use its legs. I just stood up and walked the length of an English garden, and that was it. I was suddenly walking, as though I had been practicing in secret, as though I had known how to do it all along. That afternoon I was ready, and so I began.

And I’ve never stopped. Sometimes all of the places I’ve been to and things I’ve experienced become intertwined in my memory with each other and with books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, dreams I’ve had. Sometimes the past becomes nothing more than a series of stories I’ve heard and told.

But my feet remain the truth, the evidence, the division between fact and fiction. These feet have walked through English gardens, through Canadian forests, through the fields of India. They have hiked up the Himalayas and strolled through the streets of Paris. They have been washed in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, blessed in the Ganges. They have squished in the mud of rainy concert venues, moving in time with the music. They have danced. They have jumped.  They have skipped. They have endured.

They have felt the sweet coolness of summer grass and the frigidness of snow. They have been burned and soothed on the beaches of New Jersey, Spain, France, Barbados, California, and Goa. They have led me through the busy streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, DC, Delhi, Amsterdam, Prague, London, and Rome. They have stood with me in quiet stillness on the hillsides of Ireland and Scotland.

They have taken me through churches and synagogues and mosques. They have journeyed with me through museums around the world. They have stomped along with cattle and horses and elephants. They have shopped in stores and open markets and yard sales. They have wandered through libraries and bookstores for hours. They have sat patiently through movies and concerts and plays.

They have led me on and off the stage. They have exercised with me and meditated with me. They have walked miles upon miles for charity. They have grown tough in the summers and soft in the winters. They have splashed in newly formed puddles and felt the harsh concrete on their soles. Their nails have been painted every color of the rainbow at least once and they have been placed inside every kind of shoe imaginable. They have been cut and bruised and blistered and stung, but they have also been tenderly washed and soaked and rubbed.

They have been cursed for their pain, but mostly, they have been loved for their purpose. This is what it means to love your body. Even if you have yet to learn how to love it as a whole, its individual parts deserve our praise.

Praise for the eyes that help me see the world. Praise for the ears that help me listen to others speak and cry and sing. Praise for the nose that helps me appreciate the scent of rain and flowers in spring. Praise for the mouth that helps me voice my opinions and love, that allows me to taste the delicious offerings of this life. Praise for the arms that hold others between them, that lift children up, that hug tightly. Praise for the hands that allow me to write.

Praise for the feet, that miraculous pair, who give so much and ask for so little in return. Praise for the way they have allowed me to move, and explore, and discover beauty everywhere.

One day in an English garden I stood up and walked, and my life has never been the same since. For that too, I give praise.