Truth, Half Truth, Lie

 

I was struggling to find a theme to write about when I tried what Dorothy Brande suggests in one of our previous week’s lessons - first thing in the morning start to write, not a story, but “unlock your thoughts on paper, write whatever comes to mind, before you are quite awake before reason has begun to take over from the dream function of your brain.  It does not matter what you write” (Burroway). After I finished, I noticed there was a chronological order, the first memory was the shortest.  

Truth, Half-truth, Lie

    When I was four, my parents took me to Mount Rushmore, where I rode bareback on a yak.  In the pictures by the hotel pool, my mother is holding my hand. I have long brown hair brushed into pigtails that hang in two ringlets behind my ears, wear a red zip-up sweatshirt and squint at the camera.  My brother was not in any of the pictures then. He was a newborn. I do not know where we left him.

    When I was seven, I was a flower girl at my godmother’s wedding in Flagstaff, Arizona.  I rode 1,600 miles by train from Rochester, Minnesota to Flagstaff with my grandfather, because my grandfather was afraid of flying and someone had to babysit him on the trip.  We slept in a compartment with two single bunk beds and an enormous window where I watched South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado go by, one by one in fields of green crops, sandy-coloured earth and swaying beige vegetation. I never saw any houses.  I slept on the top bunk.  The shiny silver sink flipped out of the train compartment wall like a murphy bed and disappeared back into the wall when you finished.  You had to dry it out with a paper towel from a silver dispenser over the sink.   There was a complimentary toothbrush sealed in plastic and a small toothpaste the right size for a child.  I felt like Baby Bear.  The toothpaste was in the glass that hid inside with the sink when I opened it up.

    I wore my nice dress walked around the train and ate lunch at the restaurant with white tablecloths in the glass-domed double-decker compartment watching as America’s agricultural economy swished by below.  My grandfather parted his thick white hair neatly to one side, it swept over his forehead, his crisp white shirt done up at the neck with a bolo tie; a braided leather cord with a turquoise stone as blue as his Irish eyes.  My parents flew out on a plane and met us in the desert when we landed.

    My brother was three and a half that time.  We could not afford a ticket for him to go with us, so he received a shiny red fire engine, bigger than he was. We left him with at the babysitter’s house for a week.

    When we came home, it was the middle of winter when we got to the house in the dark to pick him back up. He sat in a chair by the door waiting for us in the babysitter’s darkened living room, wearing the ski jacket I had grown out of the year before with large pink and burgundy flowers.  He had big eyes and soft brown curls around his little face, the red fire engine tight in his arms like a newborn.

    When my son was two and a half, my mother passed away.  I saw her in dreams at night sitting next to me at an auction or flying in with pale skin to kiss me on the cheek. Her hair had grown out streaming behind her. After that, the next time I was on a transatlantic flight, I went so high up into the clouds that I found her there waiting for me.  I stayed a while, we sat on cumulus clouds, blowing on cinnamon tea, while we sipped it, to cool it off.  We talked for days about life.  She laughed, called me “Honey” and smiled just like she always had when I came in the door of her apartment after I had been away for a year.