Unconnected Dots

I once heard that people can fabricate memories from when they were very young based on stories. I’m fairly sure my first memory is one of these, but I love it just the same. If this is the case, I’ve been careful with the details I have fabricated.

Wrapped in a pink and blue crocheted baby blanket the world was hazy and white. I was in my mother’s arms with my brother, 16 months my senior, beside her. It was cold and loud. We were on an airplane flying from Oregon to Alaska. We would live in Alaska for a couple of years at the most, but I would return 18 years later on my own. From later experiences I know the flight would have taken about 4 hours. When we landed my father was not there. He was hunting with my uncle. My mother, stranded at the Anchorage airport with an infant and a toddler, called my aunt Roberta and waited over an hour for her to come.

My mother and I have often discussed what happened after she arrived in Alaska. I have her bitter stories mixed with a few visual memories from the time. My father had left Oregon quite some time before to go stay with his brother who was already living in Alaska. He would be gone for days drinking and hunting and chasing women. My mother, not ready to let go of her husband when she had two young children and no real means to make money, followed him after giving up on him coming back or sending for her.

He didn’t change his activities much once she arrived. Left alone with nothing but canned salmon my father had caught and without a car or money she struggled to raise my brother and I. We lived in a run-down trailer near my aunt and uncle. In the spring when the snow would thaw and freeze the trailer would freeze and become uninhabitable.

In the dark with my cousins we played a game where colored plastic pegs could be stuck in holes in a lightbox to make pictures.

My mother, desperate to feed us and having given up on getting money from my father, found work as a receptionist for an insurance company.

My dark, handsome father bent over a boat upside down on two sawhorses sands the wood and applies red paint. We are by a cabin at a lake surrounded by spruce trees. My mother packed a picnic basket with food and I wondered if I was in a storybook.

I don’t know how the decision is reached to move away from Alaska, but we did. I am told we drove instead of flying. My next memory is of living in a trailer park in Smith River, OR, but who knows what happened or if we lived anywhere else in between.

Lost Star

July 1995

When I was twelve, my mother met my step-father, Jim. They stayed together for seven years, at the end of which I was over him. In the Bible, debt is forgiven after seven years. That’s in the Old Testament anyway. In the New Testament your sins are forgiven by Jesus so now we can have a Wall Street and debt that will never forget you or let you forget it. For him and me, step-father and step-daughter, we stopped as easily as we started. The seven year contract was over.

He was a good man, mostly gentle and kinder than earlier candidates for the role had been. He played his guitar and sang nights in bars around the Southern Oregon region, smoked weed and slept during the day. He had few ambitions beyond what he already had. In my adolescent eyes he had very few redeeming features, except one. He was the landscaper for Ginger Rogers.

The summer after the two met we moved to his dusty property in White City, Oregon. We rode with him around the small town in his green pickup with no key for the ignition, just a screwdriver left on the seat to turn the starter. Ginger Rogers had just died the year prior and the estate was in the process of being settled. He was still occasionally going up to her property in the foothills to maintain the land. Often he would teach me about how to do small landscaping tasks. He taught me how to plant flowers and I filled the flowerbed in front of the trailer with riotous marigolds, so tight they would jostle in the smallest breeze.

One afternoon, as the time he spent caretaking for her property came to an end, he took us with him. Jim, my mom, my brother Daniel and I packed into my mom’s Camaro and rolled through the hot sun. Picking up Snapples along the way, we wound along mountain roads that I would spend my early driving years trying to remember. We took a turn up an unmarked drive and approached a closed, wrought iron fence. Jim, with his long grey hair falling out from under his safari hat, punched in the code and the gate swung slowly back.

The silent house did not feel empty, but abandoned. We tip-toed through and spoke in hoarse whispers. Jim told stories about how Ginger would refuse to be seen without her makeup on.

Night fell and we stripped down to the bathing suits we wore under our clothes. Slipping into the pool in her backyard, Daniel and I played, mom and Jim talked companionably. Soon the stars rose and shone brilliantly in the mountain darkness. The smell of burnt grass cooled and turned sweet like oatmeal cookies. I leaned my head back against the concrete edge and let my body float up to rest on the surface. Watching the stars, I imagined aliens and UFO’s hovering out of sight in the solar system, but watching. A bright star, in the center of the dark sky, smoldered and winked, fluttered and sighed through the evening.