Memories I Keep (1)

Laundry Day

As a child, I remember early mornings being something of a mystery. I hadn’t quite grasped time and its finer concepts of early and late yet, and so to me, early morning was a separate reality I hadn’t earned the right to step into yet. It didn’t help that I would often go to sleep in my own bed and wake up in the apartment of Lydia, a family friend and the woman who’d take care of me when my parents were at work and older brothers at school. So, when Dad woke me up one early Saturday morning to go with him to do the laundry, I could barely contain my excitement.

After the post sleep fog wore off, it was all swift motions to get ready. The darkness and the quiet were all consuming, devouring my footsteps and dulling every light I turned on. Mom and my brothers were most likely still asleep, but how could I be sure? The quiet was so deep it could have easily erased all proof of their existence. And when I went outside, met with an entire world subdued by this same quiet, it only confirmed to me that we had entered another realm.

 The predawn was a world washed in purples and oranges and any anxiety I felt was supplanted by the wonder of this new world. The streets were bare, but muffled sounds of traffic echoed around me a few times as though the world I belonged to was bleeding through. Dad was a fan of the indirect route, so it was back alleys and unfamiliar streets to park in the small lot behind the laundromat. The buildings shifted and slid around us like being caught between the squares of a Rubik’s cube and I was convinced that we weren’t driving so much as altering space.

And then there was the laundromat. I had never seen washing machines before and to suddenly be confronted with rows of them, and walls of dryers, this world I was in was far more advanced than the one I lived in.  The molded plastic seats looked like they came from the waiting area of some intergalactic space port. The humming and vibrating washers were generators, building up their charge as they spun faster and faster, and it dawned on me that we were in the engine room that powered this alternate dimension. The air around the dryers tingled and I felt sparks when I sat down to peer through their portholes for transmissions from other travelers. It was a defining experience. How perfectly this simple outing had engaged my mind. How Dad made no attempt to diminish the novelty of each moment. It was my first lesson in speaking the language of imagination.

It’s only recently that I revisited this memory, rising up in response to seeing Dad again. I visited him last year right before Christmas during a special family day the hospital organized. It was the first time I had visited him in five years. It was five years ago that I sat with him in the living room of my childhood, transformed into a cross between a fallout bunker and scrapyard, and I was confronted with one thing I could not have imagined: the consequence of that world hopping power I marveled at as a child now gone horribly wrong. He had created a world for himself that he favored over the one that me, my brothers and Mom were securely fastened to.  He invited me to stay with him in his world and I said, “No.” It was often difficult to discern his affect, but in this moment the betrayal was clear.

When I saw Dad on that special family day, he didn’t recognize me at first. It was clear that the world hopping didn’t stop and so it took a moment for him to land on one in which I was his 36-year-old son, the youngest of three. I sat with him while he ate his lunch. He talked and I listened, only periodically reminding him to eat. Each sentence he uttered was a concussion blast from the battle being fought within him. It concealed his feelings, his history, his truth and I could not decipher him. Answers to questions I waited too long to ask are now locked away in the puzzle of his mind and any glimpse of a fragment of possible truth is stolen away by an imagination that has completely turned against him. And so, I return to this memory of that laundry day and all its sequels, trying to bring the periphery into focus. I showed my father that I could enter other worlds. I showed him that I can speak the language of imagination fluently. And although imagination is a language with 7 billion dialects, I hope it’s possible to find the words that join us to each other.