Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood

Memory and Helix

94 my father lost his childhood. He lost it in Nevada tumbleweed towns, in Union Pacific rail yards, in Oakland flyspeck boardinghouses , on San Francisco’s Embarcadero and Powell Street and Fisherman ’s Wharf. My father lost his childhood because his father, my grandfather, took my father with him when he abandoned the rest of his family. In Detroit. The year was 1919. A black-and-white snapshot taken before they left shows my father with fair hair, pale skin, and an air of guarded watchfulness, as if he were used to being the smallest pup in the pack. He was five years old. During our family vacations throughout the American West, my father looked for his childhood, much as Ahab looked for his whale. (I do not say this lightly.) What clues my father found often depressed him—and on occasion enraged him. I doubt that my father ever found what he’d lost. Oliver Sacks writes that the human brain is more like a river than a recording machine. In his essay “Neurology and the Soul” (New York Review of Books, 22 November 1990) Sacks suggests that in the human mind “nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced” and that there is “a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same.” Neil Mathison memory and helix: what comes to us from the past 95 memory and helix “It’s a poor sort of memory,” the Queen of Hearts tells Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, “that only works backwards.” This is my memory: We are parked in a Nevada rail yard in 1958, my family on its way home from Mexico. Eisenhower is president. “Purple People Eater” is playing on the car radio. In four years, in 1962, Watson, Wilkins, and Crick will share a Nobel Prize for their 1953 discovery of dna, but I’m unaware in 1958 that dna exists, and I have no idea how anything passes from generation to generation—except that I carry a vague, almost biblical acceptance that my siblings and I have inherited certain family attributes: the sharp, narrow, middle-European nose of Grandfather Will; the athleticism of my mother’s Uncle Carlton; the hot temper of my father’s brother Frank. Otherwise, I’m an eleven-year-old cooped up in a sweltering Ford with my mother, my younger brothers Charlie and Duncan, and my baby sister Charlotte. The Ford is “mountain green,” a color I remember as aquamarine. The camper-trailer hitched behind the Ford is named Papagayo, after a parrot my parents owned in Brazil, one that died from drinking too much Coca-Cola. My father stands outside the Ford so close to the tracks that if he wanted he could touch the diesel engines—a quartet of yellow Union Pacifics coupled back to back. The engine headlamps peer west as if they’ve already probed the Sierra passes and tulle-laced deltas between the town of Sparks and the Pacific, but the rear lamps face east, back toward deserts and basins and mountain ranges and prairies. My father’s past is twined on the double rails. For something like twenty minutes—an eternity, it seems to me—my father has stood like this, back to us, thumbs stuck in his seat pockets, his homemade back-flap ball cap tilted up on his head—his kaffiyeh he calls it. His left arm, the one he hangs from the car window, is red with sunburn. My father, standing in that dusty Nevada railroad yard, is forty-four years old. “What’s Dad doing?” we ask. 96 Neil Mathison “Remembering,” Mother answers. The odor of cilantro and salsa and refried beans wafts from shacks slat-sided and huddled under sun-baked cottonwoods. Duncan has to pee. “Hold it,” Mother advises. “Or go behind the trees.” Lime-green refrigerated reefers, red-slatted stock cars, piggyback flatcars with tractor-trailers crouched like beetles on their backs, oil tankers and grain-dusted hoppers—all stretch back so far we can barely make out the crimson caboose, so far away that we wonder whether it is part of the same train. The names painted on the cars sing of foreign places—Great Northern; B&O; Southern Pacific; Reading; Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe—the poetry of a continent, the lyrics of my father’s lost youth. Having tried so many times...