I can still hear the hand radio softly droning out the unfolding of the Phillies game. It's summer. And the play by play has only the noises of the woods to compete with for attention. All around me, protecting me like a mythical fortress from everything else in the world, is a cavernous tepee. I'm seven years old and still amazed at what you can build with a vision, a forest and two creative grandparents.
We'd spent nearly a whole day gathering the sticks needed for the superstructure. They had to be at least 9 feet long, essentially straight, and many of them had to end in some sort of "Y" so that they could catch each other and together, make the whole thing sturdy through their coordinated rebellion against gravity. Then, the next day we layered the walls to enclose the entire thing. It would have been buffalo skins in the old days on the prairie, but big game is scarce around here and hunting laws are tougher in Pennsylvania these days, so we use every blanket we can gather from the house. When it's all complete, it is an undeniable masterpiece. It feels like it could comfortably house a full family. We can stand up in it and walk around. And our sleeping bags barely take up any of the floor space as we get situated in the late afternoon sun. There's plenty of room for the radio.
Now, hours later, there is no more work to be done. We just lie there in our sleeping bags listening to the endless summer evening chorus outside our temporary home of bullfrogs, crickets, cicadas, countless other insects, occasional birds and the cracking twigs from foraging animals. Inside, the announcer is amazed by another diving play by Mike Schmidt at third base. It's just a routine play from one of the greatest third basemen of all time, one matched hundreds of times previously, and hundreds of times more throughout the remainder of his 20+ year career. And as he dusts off his knees and takes in the appreciation of the 30,000 people in attendance, there's no way on earth that he knows a young boy and his grandfather are milking the last minutes of four AA batteries, sitting in a tepee in the woods, listening with a kind of rapt engagement that would barely exist a few decades later, and creating a memory that would be etched into the young mind forever.
There are certain experiences from childhood that lodge themselves in your head like a barbed fish hook. In the moment, they're just another memory in a never ending stream of incoming data. But for some reason, they're processed differently. They become more than memories. They become, in fact, part of the tapestry that creates the ultimate "you".
And as I sift through my own head, it's clear that these aren't the biggest or most important events. The ingredients of the individual are more complicated than that. Of course I remember the day I met my wife, the day each of our children were born, but somehow I don't feel that these major moments were definitional experiences. I was already me by the time these things happened. Reaching further back, I remember watching a terrific lightning storm in the middle of the night, with each bolt lighting up the surroundings like it was daytime, staring in awe out the back door of our home at Cornell Quarters. I remember camping with my sister and parents on Ocracoke Island with a tropical storm filling our tent with so much water it became comical. I remember moving in 2nd grade --not entering the new house or leaving the old one-- but instead, I remember when my father stopped the moving truck quickly causing my guinea pig, which had been the class pet until they gave it to me as a going away present, to spill off of my lap along with all of her gallons of shredded chips onto the floor in front of me.
I remember a night game against Chenango Valley as the announcer informed the crowd over the loudspeaker that I had first tied and then broken a state scoring record. I remember biking around Greenbelt, Maryland alone, looking for new games to invent to play with my friends, and then later that day, once we all met up, trying to actually fry an egg on the black macadam in the 100+ degree heat. I remember cliff jumping in Ithaca's gorges in the spring when the water felt borderline glacial. I remember staring 40 feet down off the bridge preparing to do the same thing at night in the summer, and then seemingly falling much longer than it took in the daytime until out of nowhere, you hit the invisible water below. I remember learning to jiggle the fly just right with my other grandfather, finally mastering how to entice a fish to rise from the deep instead of scaring it to death. I remember buying inner tubes that were taller than my head at a truck mechanic shop with my parents to float the Lackawaxen River after a hydraulic dam release.
None of these events were big deals at the time. At no point during any of them did I think to myself, “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” But that’s exactly what happened. The question I’m left wondering is whether I was born fascinated by natural phenomena, and as a result, the massive flashes over Cornell Quarters just fit something I was predisposed to store in a certain way. Or, was it something about the imprinting itself that took an otherwise relatively mundane summer storm and through the handling of its memory, somehow helped shape the person that I am today.
Now that I am a parent, I find myself keenly aware that my own children are going through this imprinting process every day. I find myself wondering after catching our first crab with nothing more than a piece of string and some boiled chicken, will they be able to recall the look of that crab staring angrily out of its temporary home in a plastic bucket? Will they remember the joyful anxiety of slowly pulling in the string and praying that the crab won’t wise up for just another few inches while we ever so carefully position the net under its body? Or what about our invented game of beach bocce – drawing landing circles in the sand with our heels, each with a different size and point system, and then walking away like gunslingers at the OK Corral before turning to see who can hoist shells and rocks into the area with greater precision.
But I also know that the things that impact them won’t be the experiences that I’ve designed. Try as I may to make these our games, they are ultimately mine. My own parents constantly strove to create an environment as rich as possible for my curiosity to thrive. And in a thousand ways they succeeded. They were there, standing with me in the doorway at Cornell Quarters, explaining how lightning works with a sudden discharge of built up electrical energy, as each bolt proved the science behind it. They were the ones who bought the truck inner tubes so that we could float the Lackawaxen, proving that you can have more fun than a thousand expensive vacations with only a $5 bill and a dam release schedule.
And while these were certainly formative experiences, the truth is that many of my most deeply engraved memories are solitary. While one could easily be disappointed that you are not going to be a part of those memories in any pure physical sense, it's hard not to be taken in by the cyclicality of it all. Sometime soon, maybe right now even, some perfect combination of sounds, smells, sights and mood will implant itself in one of my own children and help shape them forever.
The reality for me at this stage in my life is that there is a good chance that there is simply already too much input in the system for any new experiences to imprint themselves with the same formative results. Of course I'll have an infinite array of new memories. But I suspect that, unfortunately, that's all they'll be.
So now it becomes a guessing game. What will it be? Even in the moments that I am there, will I have any idea that something out of the ordinary is happening? I find myself wondering all of this as I sit on the roof of our apartment with Jack tonight. The sun has set over the Hudson leaving a dull blue glow that only truly exists in the hot summer months. We are framed on all sides by taller buildings, zoned differently on the major cross streets of 86th and 79th – almost, like the walls of a distant tepee. We’re listening to the broadcast of the Yankees game, this time through an iPhone app, as Jeter goes deep in the hole to rob one of the Rays of a sure base hit – a play he’s made a hundred times before and will likely make countless times more before finally putting an end to his storied career. In the background, we hear only the noises of the city, the never-ending honking of horns far below on the streets and the dull droning of ten thousand air conditioners.
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