I have written lately about forgetting things.
That was easy and obvious. We elderly people are famous for forgetting. Some days are full of small disasters caused by misplacing objects, failing to show up for scheduled events and getting confused. Did I take my meds this morning?
Usually I write appointments in the appropriate spaces in my little book, my calendar. But I don’t always think to look at my calendar. Sometimes life gets very interesting without the help of a written schedule, and I just do what I want to do.
Often there are consequences. I have to apologize. I have to make another appointment. Or pay a late fee.
But enough about forgetting. The problem with this subject is that it ignores the enormous number of things I remember. Not just me, but all of us old people, though I am getting to be one of the really old crowd.
Once lately, in the evening, after a tiring day, I remembered the pleasure of being carried to bed wrapped in a warm blanket. Now that was a long time ago!
I still have in my head a clear image of mother’s little coffee pot, with a glass bulb on top and the smell of the coffee. Why the coffee pot? I don’t know. It is a symbol of something.
I remember the hoboes who jumped off the slow-moving freight trains and walked through town, offering to cut the wood, mow the lawn, anything for a sandwich. Hoboes and black people came to the back door.
I remember with envy Shirley Temple’s curls.
Children were not permitted to call adults by their names without Mrs. or Mr. in front of it.
But this rule did not apply to the black man who delivered the ice. He was “Uncle Jackson,” though he was not really my uncle.
I remember learning for myself that adults don’t know everything, though they think they do and might spank a child unjustly.
On certain days I dashed home from school to hear, “Let’s Pretend,” on the radio. Beautiful stories about beautiful, imaginary people.
I remember other things, the wild feverish itching of measles and the agony of chicken pox.
My shyness at school. The joy of learning to read. The fascination of basketball seen for the first time.
The shock of Pearl Harbor.
And, clearly in my head even now, the reassuring voice of Franklin Roosevelt.
I remember when my sister came home crying because she had lost the ration stamp on the way to the store for sugar, and Mother couldn’t make the blackberry jam.
I can still see a young man in khaki, asleep on the floor of a train. The swaying, rattling train. Nothing under him but a newspaper. He woke once, looked around, found another paper and added it to the sheets under him, saying, “Oh, that’s so much softer,” and went to sleep again. He would soon be home, and I would soon have Grandma’s incomparable cornbread, from home-grown, home-ground meal, baked in a wood stove with no thermometer, served in a bowl with milk, still warm from the cow.
I don’t even need to mention that there was no UN, no picture with the evening news, no Israel, no Palestinian refugees, not even a rumor that the atom could be split. And a black man had never been president.
Only the old remember the absence of what we never had.
But, enough already. You understand; I am very old. And knowing is the privilege of age, the gift of remembering what the young never knew. We may be famous for forgetting, but what we forget is trivial compared to the wealth stored in the cells of our bodies. We are walking libraries.
Try hard to remember this, when I ask you, “Is this Wednesday already?”
And though it messes with the shape of this essay, I have to mention that this is Armenian Massacre Remembrance Day.
In Beirut I happened to meet a survivor of this tragedy, an event denied until today by the Turks. In Istanbul they killed prominent members of the large Armenian community, who were Christians in a Muslim country. The killing created a desperate exit, and even as the terrified mob dragged themselves toward Lebanon, the Turkish army overtook and murdered thousands of people.
A visitor in our office in Beirut told us his story.
He and his parents lived in a rural area. The Turkish army was sweeping through the countryside, killing the male Armenians. When they neared their family farm, his mother helped him and his father hide under the hay in their barn. But a soldier found his father and slit his throat. And then he found the trembling child, a four-year-old.
Apparently the soldier did not like killing a child. Holding him down with one hand, he raised his knife in the other and told him, “Say, I am a Muslim, and I won’t have to kill you.”
But the child could not say these words. Now a man, he could not explain. “I knew he would kill me, but I said, I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian.”
The soldier turned and ran away, and the child fled to his mother and told her that the soldier wanted him to lie.
The two of them were among those who walked day after day after day, always hungry, their shoes falling apart, arriving finally in Lebanon.
In the 1920s there were Armenian refugee camps in Beirut. By 1964 when we arrived in Beirut, the best piano teacher in the city was Armenian. Others were doctors and artists, teachers, tailors, linguists, all people known for their character and integrity.
Obviously, Turkey was the loser.
I’m glad I remembered.