We sat in the pews of our small country church sanctuary a few Sundays ago, and before long our class was deep into a discussion about memories and how the prophet Isaiah reminded us that we were to “forget the former things,” that we are “not to dwell on the past.”
Our problem wasn’t that we wanted to argue about the validity of Scripture; we just didn’t have a whole lot of agreement as to what Isaiah actually meant when he relayed his boss’s message to us. After all, a few chapters later, the Lord tells his people to “Remember this,” and to “fix it in mind.”
Our Sunday school teacher, Tim, who happens to be my wife’s cousin (just about everyone at the church is related in some way or another) used my storytelling as part of his object lesson for the morning. Without suggesting that I simply make things up as I write, he said that there’s no way that I can probably remember absolutely every detail I use.
I didn’t argue, but I believe that the vast majority of my trips to the past are pretty accurate. I can still place kids in the rows where they sat in Mrs. Milner’s fourth-grade classroom, and I can still recall the patch of woods that stood behind our home place like the back of my hand. I can remember the first pair of basketball shoes I ever owned, too…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with allowing our minds to wander back in time every so often. I sure hope there isn’t, since I seem to be spending more and more of my free time in the cobwebbed rooms of my memory these days, for it’s not only Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey who’s had a wonderful life.
Yet, there are black holes, bits and pieces of the past that I’ve allowed to slip away. Until I gabbed with my sister this past Christmas, I had forgotten how, years ago, we — my cousin, Renee, was often a willing accomplice — used to crawl through an eerie, crawdad-filled drainage pipe under the county line road. It was a good thing to get reacquainted with those hot summer days of the past, even as there was snow on the ground and we wore sweaters in the warmth of my brother’s living room some 45 years later.
I’ll admit that every once in a while, I may smooth over the occasional rough edge of a story with the concrete of truthful intentions, with fragments of past history as I think they happened. But even though I may not remember where I’ve left my car keys, and I often swear my son has moved my tools when he hasn’t, I seem to be able to remember things from my childhood, from days when it seemed that all I had to worry about was whether my mom had restocked our cereal supply, or if I could scrounge up enough old lumber to finish my tree house, or whether I’d get much traffic at the road-side vegetable stand that I shared with my grandpa during sweet corn and tomato season.
John Irving, who knows a whole lot more about the craft of writing than I ever hope to, says that our memory is “a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory,” Irving once said, “but it has you.”
He may be right, but I’ll take my memories, even the tough ones, even the painful and mean ones that seem to creep up on me from behind, because the good ones seem to far outnumber the bad anyway.
I am who I am because of the accumulated effect my past has had on me. I learned that an iron is hot after dragging one across my belly as a youngster trying to help my mother with chores, but it hurt only a fragment as much as watching her years later as she struggled to write with her right hand after a stroke had taken the use of her left one away, her beautiful, graceful penmanship with it.
No, our memory is more friend than foe. It may be an illogical thing, but it is a powerful force in our lives of the moment. Its fickleness astounds me because when I try to remember something — the name of a song, a television actor’s face, where I left the extra shoestrings — it fails me. Yet, just last week, the batting statistics for Carl Yazstremski’s Triple Crown season — 1967 — popped into my head as if programmed there like some Manchurian candidate’s clandestine instructions. It makes no sense…
A few weeks ago, a fourth-grader in whose class I sat to talk about writing, asked me what my “favorite memory” was. Without hesitating, I told him and his friends that I can still clearly see a night when I was 9 or 10, and the headlights of my dad’s pick-up truck bounced off the trees as he pulled behind our house after a day at work. He often handed me something as he walked through our back door — a nail or a nickel or a stone he’d picked up from some construction site — so I was always there to jump into those big freckled arms of his.
As I ran to him, he pulled a brand new baseball glove out from behind his back. Even then I was a sucker for the Red Sox, and even though it was a Gary Peters model, and he then played for the White Sox, it was the first glove I could call my own. Simply put, I thought my dad was the greatest man alive; to this day, I can still feel my hand sliding into that glove for the first time; I can smell its smell, and I can see the rusty brown of its long fingers and deep pocket.
Sometimes, late at night, when sleep has decided to take a walk and I lay in the darkness thinking about this and that and the other, I move the packing boxes of past years around in my head. Most of what I recall is good; some isn’t.
It’s true; my memory may own me. So be it.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail, c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Learn more about his book, “The Off Season: The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford,” by going to his Web site at www.mikelunsford.com. He will be speaking Tuesday at the Paris Public Library. Read more about it at www.parispubliclibrary.org.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: Celebrating the power of memory
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We’ve created a honey of a problem
The Dutch clover is making its appearance in my yard this week. A cooler-than-usual spring has slowed its arrival by a few days, but it is here for now, bringing the honeybees and bumblebees with it.
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A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
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Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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Tiger on Sergio: 'It's Time to Move On'
Robot Action Connected to Human Thought
Rain Damages Brazil Soccer Stadium
NYC 911 Call Lasts for 8 Hours
RAW: NSA Director Says 50 Plots Foiled
California Cops Cruise on Stand-up Paddle Patrol
Falling Cable Hurts 10 NASCAR Fans
Obama: US Has Helped Syrian Rebels
Raw: 100K Protesters Flood Brazilian Streets
Ex-NFL Star Chad Johnson Out of Jail
Afghan Forces Take Afghanistan Security Lead
Raw: First Lady, Daughters Enjoy Irish Sights
Obama: NSA Secret Data Gathering 'Transparent'
Transgender Candidate Running in NYC
3 Charged in Ohio With Enslaving Mom, Daughter
Raw: 1 Dead in Shooting at Mo. Apartment Complex
Man Who Disrupted Flight Ranted About CIA
Oklahoma City Thunder Players Tour Moore
Raw: Huge Fire Near Yosemite National Park
Today in History June 18
Spurs' Popovich has no problem with Spurs' intensity
Inside Kim Kardashian's Premature Labor
Three Charged for Enslaving Mother and Daughter
Paige Butcher Scorches on Hawaii Beach
Video: worst way to load cargo onto a plane
Never-before-seen footage of '08 Times Square bomber
WATCH IT: Lil Wayne tramples American flag
Mariah Carey Looks Beautiful in a Tiny Cut-Out Swimsuit
Out of Control Boat Throws Passengers Overboard
See Lindsay Lohan in Rehab
Sofia Vergara Posts Perky Backside Pic in Thong
Gaga Ditches Her Crazy Couture
Caught on Tape: Teacher Accused of Beating Autistic Child
"Stay Classy" Campaign Aims to Curb Binge Drinking
Sesame Street Tackling Tough Topic Parents in Jail
Miss Utah Fumbles Interview Question
Deranged man claims Newark-bound flight was poisoned
