Stirring Point

It was a warm Saturday afternoon when my partner walked through our front door with a box in hand. I sat in a chair by the window while post-exercise endorphins danced pirouettes around my head. The B-side of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours played on the turntable. My gaze slid from everywhere to nowhere, lost in the long hallway of endless space. 

As she entered, she plopped the box on the Ottoman near my feet and pointed to my mother’s handwriting. Care packages make us all feel like children, if only for a moment, allowing us to put down the swords of adulthood and enjoy some unexpected love. We opened the box and dug through post-Valentine’s goodies: Hershey’s Kisses, pistachios, a drawing from my nephew, some cookbooks from the 1950s (originals, from my grandmother), and a signed card wishing us well. Below the items sat a camouflage hunting hat, weathered and aged, with a thin fisherman’s brim. A post-it note said it belonged to my grandfather, and with him having passed in 2006, it now belonged to me. 

I turned the hat from side to side, inspecting its threads and colors. The brim had both a floppy and stiff texture, and years of pressing against a sweaty brow had stained the crown. I placed it on my head and smiled. My grandfather’s hat. 

I don’t recall him wearing this particular cap, although I’m certain he did. It smelled like the warm air of my grandmother’s home, a distinct scent baked into the thick walls of my memory. It was the same smell of every Easter dinner in the 1990s. It was the smell of our Christmas presents as we removed them from the old JCPenny and Boscov’s boxes my grandmother reused year after year. It was the smell of every birthday card that somehow managed to capture the scent in their home like a sponge. The smell flung me back to my childhood—to him—and through my thin Rolodex of memories I’ve stored from our time together.

I often wonder if my years of hard living stole a chunk of memories from my mind and replaced them with the dark spots I now see. Football, alcohol, accidents, headshots—so many culprits threaten the pylons of a good memory. I’m often lost when friends recall stories I was part of, or when family refers to what should be seminal details of my youth. I wonder if those punishing years of helmet-to-helmet battles did this to me. Or was time itself the thief? Aging dulls the edge of every mental sword. But, concussions blunt it by bashing it against a stone.

The sight of the hat sent me digging through my memories with him. Some memories are a flashbang, lasting only a second, and wildly disorienting. The big ones endure for 10 or 15 seconds before the fog blows back in, consumes the edges, and distorts the lighting. All the images feel incomplete, like a puzzle missing important pieces. With each passing year, more of the pieces seem to disappear. 

The loudest ones sear scars into the folds of the mind. Will time capture these memories too? Of course it will. The better question is: when will time submerge these memories into its thick pool of sludge? When will they be taken? “Taken.” Like an agent of chaos is somehow in play. I blame it on football. I blame it on hard living. But I know that these were mere accelerants feeding the flames of the inevitable: common biological decay.

The hat was an obvious reminder of my grandfather and it helped surface the vivid memories that have yet to fade. There was the time we stood side-by-side on the dock at Pines Lake. I caught sunfish after sunfish, learning to bait the hook with mealworms. Or how he’d lie on the floor, eating Cheez-It crackers from the box, and howling with laughter during episodes of Married with Children. I remember how he’d come home during his shift as a security guard for a quick dinner of chicken and rice, followed by a slice of apple pie. He’d finish his pie, stand, wipe the crumbs from his uniform and seem to eclipse the rest of the world. I was convinced he was somehow carved out of wood. 

Once, while we were driving through his development, he pulled his old pickup to the side of the road and put on his flashers. He reached down for a pair of work gloves in his driver’s side door. 

“Why are we stopping?”

“A fawn,” he pointed. “All by itself. Stay here.” 

I watched his solid frame step from the truck. He was clad in blue slacks, white socks, and black loafers, and pulled on each glove as he walked. He approached the berm where the baby deer was huddled and hiked up his pants at the hips. He crouched down near its body, careful not to scare it into the road, and wrapped his arms under its shoulders and hind legs. As he stood, he pulled the fawn close to his chest and turned his back to the road. With a few gentle steps, he crossed the drainage ditch and carried the baby several paces into the woods. Then he bent down and placed the deer next to a briar patch.

After backing away, he turned and walked toward the truck. He pulled at the fingers of each glove until they slipped off his hands. Climbing into the cab, he placed the gloves back into the slot on the driver’s side door.

“Why were you wearing gloves? Were you scared to touch him?” I asked.

“I didn’t want to leave my scent on him. If the mother smelled the scent of my skin, she might not come back.”

“Why didn’t he run when you walked up to him?” I asked.

“He’s probably confused and a little scared.”

And that’s it—the complete memory. I clutch every detail like a frightened child clings to their mother’s hand. The memory, I know, is filled with flaws I can’t identify. Were his shoes really black? Did he say those words exactly as I’ve quoted them? Did he pull the gloves from the slot on the door or were they in the glovebox?

Peter Schjeldahl, the former art critic for The New Yorker, once wrote:

“Memory is a liar. It’s a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions.”

Yet I cling to these fictions as formative to my origin story. They tell me our relationship was important; I haven’t forgotten him. They tell me he left an impression worth fighting for. Often, the path to our present can be viewed through the memories of our past, and these little vignettes become precious. They frame a perspective for our personal algorithms that dictate why we sometimes behave the way we do.

I recall a time when I was 12 when the two of us spent a day organizing his basement. We arranged boxes, moved antiques, cleaned tools, shuffled lumber, and sorted old medicine bottles. He dug them up 40 years earlier as a young man in Trenton, NJ. Many bottles were from the 1910s and 1920s. Their cobalt blues and rich brown surfaces made me feel like I was holding something from another planet. We worked hard for hours. When quitting time hit, he reached for a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale on a bench near the door. He peeled a can from the plastic yoke, then stopped and peeled a second one. I remember the knobs of his knuckles as his arm extended to hand me a can. As a child, I’d pushed against the shrapnel in his knuckles like I was sliding a penny across a table. “Police action,” they called it, referring to the Korean War. Not many men end up nearly blown to pieces in a tank during a “police action.” Now, that same hand, littered with metal chunks and slivers, handed me the first and only beer I’d ever drink with my grandfather. I can still hear the sound of carbonation pressing against the surface of the can as it cracked under the pry of the pull tab. 

“You worked hard today and you’re old enough to enjoy a beer,” he said. “Just don’t tell your grandmother.” 

When he put the can to his lips, he leaned his head back as if his neck were fused and poured the liquid down his throat. I watched carefully and did the same, enjoying the cool sensation as it coated my throat. We took turns slugging from our cans in silence, one arm akimbo, while the damp summer air cooled against our skin. I drank the last drops, then lightly shook the can, hoping for another. My grandfather finished his, took my empty and pulled the string on the overhead light. From here, the memory fades to black. 

I don’t know where the truth of these memories ends or where my embellishments begin. The memory of our conversation is strained. The details are fuzzy and the whole process of trying to remember feels flimsy.  What was real and what was crafted in the mind’s laboratory? I’m no longer sure.

When I wear his hat or wrap my aging hands around the hickory handle of his old hammer, I feel a sense of connection. These are artifacts of modest means, as my grandfather was far from ostentatious. Their function has limited value to me. My 30-ounce framing hammer from Lowes can bend steel. And my closet is full of hats made of nylon and merino wool that are prime for multi-month expeditions to Timbuktu and back. But my modern-day tools are just tools—ones of infinite volume—to be lost, broken and replaced. Family artifacts are conduits to memories. And conduits to memory are limited and fleeting—they’re precious commodities to be cherished.

From time to time, I hold these artifacts in my hand and work to conjure what I have left of my grandfather. I sip these memories like a can of cream ale in his basement. I sip them in silence, and then I shake the can, hoping that somehow there may be a little more in there to enjoy.