On February 8, 1969 , a meteorite weighing over 1 ton fell on Chihuahua , Mexico
Try as I might, I’ve never gathered too much information about the day from either of my parents. When I’ve asked, I’ve learned it was cold and rainy. There was no blizzard, no mad dash to the hospital on the back of a snowmobile, no giving birth in a car along a rural road somewhere. Nothing to write home about. For all intents and purposes, the best I can figure is that it was your average Saturday, except for those folks in Mexico. I imagine they remember it clearly, especially anyone in the meteorite’s path.
My mom shared a few details, none of which is the making for stories you tell your kids or grandkids. I've searched for clues in my nearly untouched baby book, reading it cover to cover looking for anything that might tell me more about the day I was born. The section for comments made by family members upon my arrival were mostly blank. Perhaps, my arrival left everyone speechless because my dad was the only one who had something to say.
According to Mom’s fine penmanship he said, “That’s a huge weight off my shoulders.” I asked her what this meant because it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. She didn’t know, but she assumed it meant he was relieved. But, by the tone of her voice, I could tell she was the one who felt she had more right to feel relief because he spent his time in the waiting room while she was laboring and delivering. Some men would refer to this as the good ole days.
While my first few days remain a mystery, the one thing I do know for certain is that following my birth, my parents took me home to the house trailer where they resided. I spent my first five years surrounded by family. We lived next door to my mom's parents. On the other side of my grandparent’s house set another house trailer where my grandma’s mom lived, my great-Grandma Jones. Now if that wasn’t enough family to pack into a few acres, my grandpa’s mom lived in the house with them, Grandma-Great, as I called her. My dad’s parents lived just a mile away. I grew up thinking everyone’s family was as accessible as mine.
Some of my earliest memories are a bit sketchy. Some might not be actual memories of my own, but those created by thumbing through photo albums and shoeboxes full of photographs that never found a home in an album. Some might be stories that were told to me time and time again, and through the telling and listening, became my stories.
Seldom do I need to turn to others to jog my memory. I am the retainer of moments in time. I am the person you call when you can’t remember the name of the boy who dressed like Johnny Cash in fourth grade or who the girl was who played guitar on the long bus rides home. Events with no meaning and those that shaped the person I am today come back to me. The good, the bad, the inconsequential. They are all there – resurfacing unexpectedly, conjured by the senses, similar events, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. They reside in journal entries, weekly columns, and stories I tell my own children about what it was like when I was growing up. Sometimes pleasurable; other times, painful. A gift. A curse.
The brain works in strange ways. What we remember and why is a mystery. I don’t have the slightest idea why, or even how, I remember the things I do. I’m definitely wired differently than the average person who will ask me, “How do you remember that?” to which I reply, “How can’t you remember it?”
There are things I remember with most certainty. I know these early recollections are mine:
My baby brother was born in September of 1972 when I was about 3 ½ years old. On the day he came home from the hospital, I sat beside Mom on the couch, on a pillow just as she, and held my T-bear in my lap while she cradled the tiny newborn.
Grandma-Great kept her post rocking in her chair listening to the Christian station on the radio. She lost her vision to glaucoma in her 30s, and oftentimes, one of her eyes peeked open revealing the bluest of eyes. When I look in the mirror, I recognize the blue.
Grandma Jones had a chamber pot in her bedroom. It was the greatest source of intrigue I had encountered in my young years. She didn’t have to trek down the short hallway in her house trailer at night to use the bathroom. She had a toilet right there in her room. It was nothing short of magical to me. If I made an extra strong argument that I couldn’t hold it any longer, she would let me use the chamber pot, not once complaining about having to empty out the metal bucket.
One night, when I was supposed to be in bed, I got up to find my mom watching TV while eating Seyfert’s BBQ potato chips and drinking milk. Instead of making me go back to bed, she let me join her. The chips never tasted so BBQ-y and the milk never colder. It’s probably one of my favorite memories.
Sometimes, there is little importance to the things I remember. I mean really, how pivotal was it that I got the wrong crocheted shawl after a family dinner and my second cousin took home mine instead? The exchange of shawls went peacefully, and I couldn’t have been more than three years old at the time. Yet, I remember, but I couldn’t fathom a guess why.
Maybe on that day I was born, uneventful as it was on earth, they were running low on special gifts and talents. As they rummaged around the bins labeled athlete, dancer, artist they turned up empty-handed. There in the corner, possibly, there was a bin they didn’t often dip into. Instead of being blessed with the legs of a dancer or the stamina of a basketball player, I was given a different gift. The gift of a phenomenal memory.
These stories, including the devil who drove a station wagon, are what I remember.
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