Tricks of Memory

Sometimes I imagine that I’m in a room filled with all of the friends, family, and acquaintances I’ve ever known.  My wife is there.  So are my parents, my sister, and my whole extended family.  Arrayed around me are many of my best friends.  Jonathan and Ronald, two of my childhood basketball buddies, talk sports with a group of my Dallas friends.  They appear to know each other even though location and time separate them; in reality they’ve never met.    

Here and there, mixed in with the more familiar faces, I also see strangers I met only once—a retired federal employee who sat next to me on an Amtrak train from Boston to Seattle, who for his entire life had commuted from Spokane to Seattle only by train; a German backpacker whom I spent the day with wandering the ruins of Tulúm in the Yucatan; or Tarzo, a Brazilian journalist who, with a strange delighted glint in his eye, spun global conspiracy theories in a Buenos Aires hostel so many years ago.

Still others may be people I saw every day for a period of time in my life and with whom I barely exchanged more than a friendly “hello”, yet whose “hello” was just what I needed in that moment of a rough day.  Pete, a math teacher whose classroom shared a hall with mine when I taught Spanish near Houston, expounds on a recent scientific discovery.  Pete made me feel welcome in a school where, as a new teacher, I knew hardly anyone. 

It’s strange the tricks memory plays on us.  Storytelling requires chronology and sequence, yet memory is only sometimes chronological.  Everything it contains seems to have happened all at once.  I was reminded of this when I returned to my hometown, Austin, last year.  The more deeply I immersed myself in this massive city that once seemed small, the more random recollections exploded in my mind.  They lit up like so many thousands of lightning bugs on a cool Michigan night, bright and ephemeral and impossible to snatch out of the darkness. 

In an instant I remembered running through the woods near my friend Albert’s duplex.  We played hide-and-go-seek and tussled with other kids whose aim was to bully us.  Those woods are long gone.  In their place stand cookie cutter houses that over time have come to look as if they’ve always been there.  Their apparent permanence makes me question how big those woods were, with their sprawling live oak trees, where the odd rattle snake slithered among loose stones.

Over time I comprehend better why generations struggle to understand each other.  While in Austin I stopped by the ice cream shop I worked at when I was in high school.  I opened the very door I had windexed a thousand times and was greeted by a smiling teenager.  “Welcome to Baskin Robbins!” he said.  I told him I had worked there too when I was about his age.  He nodded but didn’t say much. 

Then it occurred to me that when I was his age, he had yet to even be born.  He wouldn’t enter this world for another four years.  Most of my world predated his.  Hence, it didn’t exist to him.  History before his birth was a mere instant, not the long, sometimes meandering personal history I had experienced as my life.  How strange, but also how exhilarating that we get to experience life with the same newness and exhilaration as every generation that has come before us.

*I’ve decided to start blogging again.  I have missed it, and it has been far too long.  I will be rusty for a while.  I invite any newcomers to peruse through my older posts. 

Pictures of Austin:








Lost Footprints: Returning to the Places of Childhood


What can I say? Sea gulls are always awesome.






Osprey eating a fish.

Grandma knitting at the beach.

Sanibel Island, Florida.

Is the Moon Lonely? Time to Start Blogging Again




The Geography of Identity; Where Blue Bonnets Paint the Hills







Glowing Fields and Shimmering Seas

The boy winced at the sound of the breaking waves and glanced up at his father.  “It sounds like someone’s clapping,” he said.

“Does the ocean scare you?” his father asked.


“That’s because you’ve never seen it before.”

The father and son stood side by side, two hundred feet from the crashing waves, where the white sand of the beach gave way to rolling dunes and the tall, swaying grasses that anchored them in place against the ravages of the ocean.  Each wore dirt-stained blue jeans.  The father wore a white T-shirt smudged with grease.  The boy wore a white button-up shirt with yellow sweat stains around the collar.   Father and son wore tennis shoes whose soles were cleaving off.  The boy, who rose to just below his father’s shoulder, squinted at the sun hanging overhead in the clear blue sky, then at the ocean rumbling toward the shore.

“It reminds me of home,” the boy said to his father.

“Of North Dakota?”

“Yeah.  The way the waves rise and fall, the way the wind sends shivers through the water—it’s like the wheat fields at home, how they sway back and forth and they go on forever to the edge of the earth.  The wind screams there, too.”

The boy looked toward the sky.  A seagull hovered overhead.  He looked left and right and saw all around him seagulls gliding, landing, waddling across the sand and trailing webbed footprints behind them.  Some fought over fish carcasses.  Others pecked at their grey and white feathers.  Their calls cut through the roar of the ocean.  “It sounds like they’re telling us to leave.  They’re saying, ‘Go!  Go!’” the boy said.

“You think they don’t want us here?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe they don’t care.”

The father glanced at his son and nodded toward the ocean.  His son shrugged, and together they shuffled forward through the sand.  The ocean grew louder.  The gulls grew more insistent: “Go!  Go!” they called.

Now a gust of wind heaved the salty air at the boy and his father.  The boy lost his balance and nearly toppled over.  He stumbled backward and caught himself.  The father nodded toward the ocean again, and again the two of them edged closer.

“Another hundred feet,” the father said to his son and gazed at the sea.  The sun had sunk closer to the horizon and the ocean shimmered.  It roared louder and the fine spray of the breaking waves lingered in the air.

A moment passed and the boy said, “Actually, it’s like home, but it’s also different.”

“It’s angrier than home.”

“Yeah, and the sun is different.  At home it pours out light and the wheat fields drink it in.  When the sun sets, the fields glow golden and they give back some of the light they drank in.  And the fields smell like summer.”

“And what happens here?”

“Here the sea doesn’t drink in the light.  It spits it right back up at the sky.  But some of the light pools on the water and even forms little streams.  And here it smells like dying things, but it’s a good smell.”

“The pools of light are just reflections,” the father said.

“I know.”

“You’re right.  It does smell good.”

The father stood on his left leg and took off his right shoe and sock, then stood on his right leg and took off his left shoe and sock.  The boy leaned on his father and did the same.  He dug his feet into the sand and felt its heat flow into him.  He dug in another inch and now felt a chill pass through him from the cool, moist sand beneath the surface.

His father smiled at him, winked, and took his son’s hand.  Together they dragged their bare feet through the sand, closer to where the ocean pounded the beach.  Finally they stepped into the edge of a retreating wave.  The boy jumped, then laughed.  He pulled his father onward, until the the father was wading up to his knees and the boy up to his waste in the surging waves.

They bobbed up and down, and the boy said, “It’s like it’s playing with us.  It’s not angry.”

“You’re right.  But it could break us so easily.”

The man and the boy held hands and let the waves rock them while they watched the sun sink into the ocean.  “Now I get it,” the boy said.  “The ocean swallows the sun whole every evening and frees it every morning so that it can shine down on the fields of wheat at home.”

“That sounds right.”

The boy and his father waded back to shore, and, not pausing to dry off, put on their socks and shoes and turned their backs on the darkening ocean.

“Would You Like Whipped Cream, Nuts, and a Cherry?” Thoughts on First Jobs

I remember it so well.  I interviewed at the Baskin Robbins on Stassney Lane, in South Austin, wearing navy blue shorts and the first white polo shirt I had ever owned.  I was fifteen.  I didn’t know how a person was supposed to conduct himself in an interview, and it didn’t matter that I was seeking a job that involved little more than scooping ice cream and blending shakes.  It would be my first job, and that fact alone made it the most nerve-wracking interview I would ever endure.

I got the job.  Whatever I was supposed to do to come across as responsible, earnest, and hard-working, I did.  I had worked for a mere two weeks when the manager foisted upon me the unwanted responsibility of closing the store with another employee, Candace, who had been hired the same day I was.  The owner, Boyd, told me I was supervisor for the night.  Candace and I proceeded to leave the store in pristine shape, only to mess up arming the security system, thus triggering the alarm, an automated midnight call to the owner, and a groveling apology from me to him.  “It’s OK,” he told me in a cracking voice.  “This is how you learn.”

I loved working at Baskin Robbins.  I’ve had lots of jobs since then.  For one summer in college I worked at Yosemite National Park, checked people into tent cabins, and hiked to my heart’s content.  I tutored elementary kids in Austin, substitute taught, and finally taught high school in the suburbs of Houston and Dallas.  But none of these jobs brought me the exhaustive satisfaction and sense of mastery that I enjoyed while working at Baskin Robbins.

What did I love so much about serving ice cream?  I loved giving people something they yearned for and that made them happy.  In few jobs do you see the immediate results of your work, but when you serve ice cream the reward comes the moment you hand a little boy a chocolate covered ice cream cone with a fat scoop of Rocky Road balanced on top.  He smiles at you, thanks you, yanks the cone from your hand, and scurries away to join his friends at a table where already they’re making a spectacular dripping mess.  So that’s one thing I loved: instant reward for providing to my customers instant gratification.

I also loved the job because it was perfectible.  If I could master the routines that sustained the store, learn by heart how to prepare every item on the menu, memorize the prices plus tax, and assess the quirks and needs of each customer who walked in, I could achieve perfection.  I knew which customers wanted a server who smiled, which ones wanted efficiency and nothing more, and which ones needed someone to talk to and had actually come for conversation more than for ice cream.

My favorite customers were the regulars.  One man, with a long grey beard and tired eyes, came in every day and ordered a single scoop of vanilla ice cream.  And every day, with those tired eyes, he asked me to ask him a question that would yield a story from him, maybe about how when he was a kid his father used to come home early from work every Friday and treat him to a single scoop of vanilla and a movie.  He wanted me to cheer him up and coax out reminders of the happy boy who still peered out at the world from behind those tired, lonely eyes.

One woman, who wore elegant business suits and huge glasses with thick, rectangular lenses, came in every Friday after work.  She ordered the same banana milkshake every time, and she said hardly a word to me or any of the other teenagers who worked at the store.  But though she was quiet, she smiled uncontrollably—and sometimes, even giggled—when we asked how her week had gone (to which she responded with a hushed, “good.”) and wished her a good evening.  When she skipped weeks and failed to come in, we worried about her, and we told her so the following week when she kept her appointment with our store.

Of course, I wouldn’t do this now, being much older and more mature (ahem), but as a teenager I also knew when a girl wanted to flirt, when to embellish my scooping skills and technique with unnecessary flexing of my (admittedly) skinny forearms.  Thank goodness standards for strength and physique were different when I was a teenager.

I scooped dutifully.  I didn’t steal.  I mopped floors, scrubbed dishes, replaced three gallon bins of ice cream by the dozens every night.  I secured the day’s earnings in the safe, armed the alarm, and made sure every counter in that ice cream shop was spotless before I left each night with my fellow employees, knowing with near certainty that we could not have done better and that the owner would walk into perfection the next morning.

First jobs teach us a lot about people and life.  Service jobs in particular confer on us the privilege of seeing every day a slice of a thousand different lives from a thousand different walks.  The people who live these lives come from poor, middle class, and rich backgrounds.  Some are happy, some are sad.  Others literally walk to your store from a nearby mental hospital.  In such jobs we work with teenagers who attend different high schools and run in different social circles, older veterans of the service sector who have gotten by on low wage work for most of their lives, and owners who have toiled for decades to create their idea of the perfect business.  I would rather not imagine how impoverished would be my understanding of people had I never worked at Baskin Robbins.

Image Credits:

The Wisdom of Innocence


