Lionel Retrospective

Memory’s a funny thing. With time, memories are often lost. They fade from year to year, until eventually they are gray and foggy and exist only in the very back of your mind, and even then only if you concentrate very hard. But then, on the other hand, there are some memories that manage to resist the aging process. These are the ones that you can remember as easily as if it was yesterday that they happened, though most of the time, it’s been years and years. This is the case for me when it comes to a memory of my mother. It was a cool fall day in my childhood, and it was just the three of us out on the pier. Me, my mother, and the dinghy. I’d been hiding. Earlier that day, I’d overheard our maid, a large woman by the name of Sandra, say something rude about my father, and it was eating me up inside. At four, I looked at my father as if he were the sun and everything else in the world a lesser planet in his orbit, and so I just couldn’t understand why Sandra didn’t like him. It was a deeply disturbing concept to me, and because in my young brain I was merely an extension of my father, I felt personally slighted. My mother found me, as she often did. She had an uncanny ability for knowing exactly where I would run to. “Ahoy,” she said. I was feeling very sullen, so I turned my back and didn’t answer. My mother persisted. She asked me questions and tried to get in the dinghy with me, but I wouldn't budge. It’s funny: to this day, when I think of my mother I think of a pillar of stone—strong, sturdy, and utterly unbreakable—but in reality, she’s as slender as a toothpick. I suppose it’s her inner strength that makes me see her this way. Certainly, it was this inner strength that allowed her to remain perfectly calm when I finally came out with it minutes later: “Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.” “Do you know what a kike is, baby?” my mother asked me. Actually, I did, so I was very confused: a kike was the brightly colored piece of fabric you could fly in the sky on windy days, so why Sandra thought my father was one, and a big, sloppy one, too, was beyond me. I said as much to my mother. “Tell you what we’ll do,” she replied. “We’ll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we’ll eat the pickles in the car, and then we’ll go to the station and get Daddy. Okay?” This sounded like fun to me, especially the pickle part, so I allowed my mother to help me out of the dinghy. We raced to the house; my mother let me win. Later that afternoon, after a snack of pickles and bread, I laughed and played alongside my parents like any other little boy. The incident was soon erased from my mind, and I only ever thought of it once a short time later, when Sandra was inexplicably fired. I told my mother I was glad she was gone, and my mother smiled strangely at me and said that she was, too. It was only when I was older, a young adult in my twenties, that the memory unburied itself, and I was able to understand things in a way that my four-year-old self could not. To this day, when I see a kite floating on the breeze, I think of that old maid of ours. But even more so than that, I think of my mother. I think of the way she knelt by the dinghy and spoke softly to me until I was okay enough to come out, and I think of the dinghy itself, a tiny little thing, but at the time it seemed as grand as a pirate ship to me. I also think of my heritage; at times as a boy it made me miserable, but now, I am proud of who I am and where I come from. I think of these things and I smile.