TheBanyanTree: creek's high and the memories flood

[Julie Anna Teague]

I could weep for one more early summer morning, bent down into my 
grandpa's damp, green rows of strawberries, looking for the fat, red 
ones.  To discuss with him the difference between the June bearing and 
the ever-bearing, to talk berry deals. Or one more afternoon, snapping 
beans or shelling peas on the front porch, right up next to my grandma 
so we could put them in the same big bowl, in the red metal chairs that 
just slightly rocked.  It's not another day of my own youth I want back 
so badly, it's a day in their lives--their wisdom and simplicity and 
contentment.  For grandma's serene smile and blue eyes alone, I would 
almost sell my soul.

I caught a minute of Lawrence Welk the other night.  It seems unfair that
I can still hear those insipid songs and see him in his pastel 
polyester suits, but I can no longer hear in my head the sound of my 
grandma singing along.  I can no longer remember exactly how she looked 
or what she wore on all those Saturday nights I happily spent watching 
Lawrence Welk with her, wishing to be nowhere else but there, pouring a 
small bottle of coke three ways into the tiny  glasses.  Grandpa and I 
got a little glass each and she always just wanted a sip.  It seemed 
like enough of everything--that I remember.  It's not fair that I can 
hear the Lennon Sisters anytime I care to, but grandpa's raucous, 
booming laugh has become a hollow shell of a sound in my head and all 
but left me.  And once I forget, and my cousins forget, or we pass on 
and our kids are left, then what happens to that laugh?  Will it be as 
if it never existed, this sound that is infinitely more important to me 
than Lawrence Welk's "Ah one and ah two.."?

My uncle bought my grandparents a tape recorder one year, maybe late 
60's.  It had a little reel of tape that one had to snap into the 
device and then carefully feed over to another little empty reel.  I 
can see it.  I can see the box it came in and the little box of tapes.  
We taped my grandpa telling some of his stories, while my cousins and I 
sat around laughing, grandpa laughing the loudest and longest.  I can 
see, almost touch, that tan and pale blue box and the little reels.  
They are both dust now, somewhere.  A technology that is as if it never 
existed, and my grandpa's voice turned to dust along with it.  Poor 
families keep poor records in that regard.  There are some pictures 
losing their color, and that is it.  The rest is in me and my family.  
I try to pass these stories along to my son, but he only really 
experience his own life.  We can remember the stories, but we can all 
only really carry the experiences and emotions of our own lives.

I could weep for one more day with them, as if that would ever be enough.

Julie





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