Three generations of Wrights are present for this culmination of a mutual interest in Steam Trains We're riding on one, baby. Ok, actually it's gonna be a Diesel train but it'll be something vintage and it's going to take us on a long trek around parts of Washington I don't really acknowledge in daily life. It'll be lit.
After an occasionally fraught reunion (Chaya is not polite and jumpier than ever, so there's a rewarming period with visitors these days). We stopped in Seattle for eatz and an orca break of course.
Now we're in a capacious Air BnB in an exurban labyrinth somewhere near but not in Olympia proper. The house is peculiar for its bridging of genres. Touched with generic hotelisms in some areas and buried in personal dross and shiny new consumption in others. The owner clearly lives in a few of the rooms on a regular basis. The fridge is full of perishable foods we are not to touch. One room is a pile of possessions and technically "off limits". The degree of potential security and surveillance through the compound is intimidating. But it's all good.
Chaya, Daddy/Andrew, and Grampa Tom are together again and up to mischief. I mean they will be once they all wake up from their sleep-ins.
Some moments, seeing them all together, I feel the present-absence of that fourth generation beyond
Awww weren't they all adorable back in 2015?? Chaya has a Grampa Tom. So did Andrew. This is his Grampa Tom meeting Chaya shortly after her birth.
Andrew's Grampa was an achingly sweet and kind man. It does my heart good that he and Chaya had a year and change to get to know each other. And I miss him and wish Chaya would know more of him now that she can form words and impressions so clealy.
It's a funny reality of life that Chaya will know him only by photo and story. I suppose I have living relatives I could say the same about, but the absence of presence when memory forms or fails to form has a eerie quality to it. That my father's parents are largely felt as borrowed sensation. I remember a smokey smell from my Nanew. I remember a certain distinct quality of inhibited movement from my grandfather. I knew my father's connection to them. I felt their deaths largely on those grounds and the feeling was profound in a way that sticks with me. But surely we had moments of connection the way Chaya and her great grandfather did.
And I think of all the best friends, crushes, worst enemies and mentors who lined my childhood into adulthood. How presence ebbs and flows. Whether people pass on or simply live their way out of our lives, the elasticity and impermanence of even the memory that glues our temporal selves together is a dizzying thing.
We give parts of ourselves whenever we really connect with others. Give, not lend. Irretrievably theirs to take and inalienable once taken. We can stop giving but we can't recover possession of what was given; we can only reunite with it through our connection with these people. In the spaces in between, we can only trust that this little bit of self will be nurtured and protected by the recipients.
Separation and loss from those who matter are existential in the sense that this part of us is lost as well. Perhaps taken hostage to slowly suffocate in overlay after overlay of fresh memories. Perhaps simply gone. Perhaps reformed in a million unanticipated shifts of story and intention. Perhaps preserved carefully and with love. Perhaps it's when the latter occurs that we find those friends we can simply pick back up with across decades, but only if we too have carefully held the self-slivers they entrusted to us.
Do we inevitably lose each other in the eternal rewriting and evaluation of memory? Why does it seem that sometimes we don't?
Memories fade and are rewoven, but we carry these talismans in so many little ways in pure essential feel. They remain latent until suddenly a sensation sparks. A scent. A musical snippet. Turns of phrase. Simple flashes that evoke less a story than a series of sensations once encoded into our selves and which relight dormant existence. Experience, self and love are written into our bodies even when our minds take the world a life and self at a time. My loves and lives carry on within me in a million little things that occur outside the well-told narrative moments and fill in the spaces instead of the tiniest but fullest self...
The piquant zest of body odor; a scent that reads as uniquely as a finger print and immediately recalls a million subtleties of scent and soul from across rooms and across time.
That classic coconut coppertone marinade baking on my father's skin in summer. Feeling the sticky ridges that line the sides of the container and the shocking submersion of cold with a first splash into the lake from a warm sunny day. The scent of wet wood as my hand touches our sopped dock.
The reek of rosin and cat piss baking on treated wood. The ridges of well worn barre and the slick stick of that wood floor. Heat from a sunny window boring into my neck. The gleeful ache of stretched muscle set to Chopin.
Sunbaked grass mixed with a savory overlay of scorched meat. Beads of sweat on a frosty fizzy something. A simultaneous rush of nerves and utter calm as the party of people I am so shyly and overwhelmingly fond of revolves around me. The breadth of breath as a momentary glance is shared. A tinkle of nerves as new people come and go and conversations erupt around me.
The powdery warmth of my infant child's calvous dome (so perfectly round for never having slept on her back despite all recommendations... just like Chaya to do it all her way) and her tiny hands contracting and releasing mindlessly against my chest like a tiny kitten.
Knuckles breezing my back as a coworker skims closely behind in our hurried ballet to finish faster. Each knuckle against my spine like a harpist's arpeggio in a subtle but deep impression of an accidental but lingering contact.
Lapping splosh of water underneath the dock that my new roommate (and soon to be bosom buddy, I can already tell this in my bones) and I are laying on in the middle of the night. The smell of baked brick fading into some night flower all spiced with brine that makes you feel you can breathe in the stars.
A stab of plummeting vertigo in my lowest abdomen at the moment a cautious hug warms into a deep embrace saturated in unanticipated sadness. Moment melting into an eternal second of mutual presence all drenched in the incautious stench of stale beer and once-smoked cigarettes and a patina of celebration.
The smell of cedar and grass and children's laughter. A sense of peace and a feeling anchored in the slow movement of a puffy gray cloud.
The heady sensation of a shared pulse and breath as sweat mingles, as bodies buzz and as the music fades. A shared smile and a shared blush as if our nervous systems had momentarily merged before the spell fades gradually and distance reasserts itself.
The agonizingly satisfying sear of ripped skin on the top of every toe, and the muted but visceral thud of pointe shoes. And the moment when it all dissolved into a rainbow of haze through long lashes in stage light.
The musky gasoline smell of Argentine cobblestones blending into an amber afternote from cream I'd brought. Distinguished somehow from the similar aromatic palate of Rome. And nothing like the mildewed earthiness of Venice.
The gustatory chaos of mango cheese on a platter of fruits and cheeses shared on the carpet at 10 p.m. with a good friend. The irresistible cacophony of flavor that made us both unable to stop sampling. The abdominal ache of a deep belly laugh.
A scintillating sapor of a sourdough pepper jack grilled cheese in a well baked diner at 2 a.m.
The tickling gentleness of my father's finger stroking my palm as if tracing out his prayers for my future across the lines already there.
And a million other scents and sensations. Some more private. Some of fully uncertain origin. All ringing and reacting through my nervous system as I move through this morning.
I wonder if Chaya's early experiences are as yet encoded within her somewhere. I wonder if she'll remember the clatter of the train and how her teeth rattle. The warmth of her grandfather's hand and the smoothness of the whale she's climbing. Will future memories incorporate these and enforce them? Or will it be memories of memories written on photographs and stories?
I can't really say a quarter of that about myself and certainly not my childhood. I can't imagine for Chaya. But I like to think the impressions she feels now persist in some form along and I am staggered at how many are still to be formed.
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