When they first heave into view I’m not sure whether I’m looking at a direct memory, or a photograph I saw long ago.
Maybe it is only a the memory of a memory laid down in the still-soft bedrock of childhood impressions.
One of my earliest recollections, misty but with a smack of authenticity, is a gravel pit. It was really a series of mounds, like sand dunes in the Sahara, with steeply sliding slopes. A huge conveyor belt brought the gravel in size-sorted batches and dumped them onto piles that were already high. I walked along the crest of a pebble dune and then stepped over its lip and rode with a loud clatter of stones all the way to the bottom. I scrambled back up, losing with each step but finally reaching the top, my face sweaty, happy. I was ready to tip over the edge and slide down again, but my mother caught me around the middle I as started to let go and swung me onto her hip.
My father was walking bent over, looking at rocks. Visiting that memory now, I’d say he looked like a man desperately old, unable to straighten up. But that day I pointed at him and declared “L” to my mother. She’d begun to teach me the alphabet, and I recognized the angle of the L, the same angle, more or less, with allowance for orientation, that my father made as he scanned the pebbles.
He always loved rocks and things made of hard minerals: petrified wood, fossils, arrowheads hand fashioned in a bygone age, semiprecious stones among the rubble at the inside bend of a river. These objects seemed to be windows for him, windows into a past forgotten by the world but which lived for him as if they were his personal memories.
My father picked up a rock and showed it to me. It was drab as dirt. Then he licked it and held it in front of my eyes again. “Hon-ee!” my mother protested, glancing in my direction.
But I was all intent on the wet surface of the stone, suddenly transformed into a gleaming swirl of red and pale yellow and white. “Lake Superior agate,” my father said. “It washed down the river from far away, until it got here. It took years and years. Little by little, the sand in the water smoothed away all the rough places on the rock and polished it.” He smiled and slipped the stone into an already bulging pocket.
Many years later I compared my recollection of the gravel pit to my father’s. He knew exactly where the place was — in Bellevue, Iowa, near the Mississippi River. The Second World War was on. We lived near Chicago, and he went to the gravel mounds to look for agates only a few times, because it was a long way, and gas was rationed.
The time that my mother and I went with him, we stopped for a picnic by a river halfway home. There I balanced my inseparable companion, a black-and-white toy panda, on the low limb of a tree so he could sit beside us while we ate. And when we got home, and I was getting into bed, I couldn’t find Teddy. The panda had stayed in the tree, and that tearful night I went to bed without him. Although my father had to go to work the next day, he started up the Plymouth again and drove back to the river and by the light of his headlights retrieved Teddy, soggy with dew, from the branch.
I remember the gravel pit, and I remember my grief that night, but I don’t remember my father’s extra trip for the stuffed bear. Yet I believe him, for Teddy was with me throughout the rest of my childhood.
The day after I asked my father about the gravel pits, he gave me a reddish stone, small enough to conceal in my fist. It had beautiful close bands of color. He’d put a note with it that said, “Lake Superior Agate. We found this at the gravel pit at Bellevue IA in 1944 & took it home to Des Plaines IL & then to So. California. From there it went with me to Kailua HI, then to Kerrville TX, & it is now about 115 miles as the peregrine flies from where we found it.”
I remember something else about our day in Bellevue, an affectionate ease between my parents. The world seemed a good and friendly place. That small space in which the mist clears on my parents among the gravel mounds is a window for me on the past and on grace.
Diane - your writing "had me at hello" I could feel, taste, see and live each moment of this story. I felt your mom swing you onto her hip - I tasted the mud that your dad licked off the stone. And Ohhhhh - did I feel the love of your daddy, returning to save teddy. Your writing is amazing (actually there are no words to describe it) It is pure experience.