Inherited Memories
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight….I shall try to fly by those nets.
-Stephen Dedalus[1]
December 14, 1968
Blue Point, New York
The first snow blanketed Blue Point last night. The Long Island landscape appears white and pure, for a change, and as bright as the sun itself. If only those snowplows would stay out of the streets for a littlewhile. Bayview Avenue makes for the best sledding, especially with that bump at the end, right before you get to the bay. Aside from sledding, there is only one thing I can think of on a day like this. I don’t think of snowmen, snowball fights, or a warm cup of hot chocolate, but of how brightly red paint appears on the white snow.
Winter in Long Island
I came up with this new prank last summer, and I knew the perfect person to execute it—my little brother Terry. He’s up for anything as long as it buys him a few harassment-free days from me. So, I ran over to Billy Gallagher’s house a few blocks down Fairview and told him to bring the red paint that his mom used to paint his house last spring. Billy and I brought Terry to Blue Point Avenue and told him to lie down in the piles of plowed snow, so that he was easily visible from the street. We splattered the red paint around his head making it look pretty gruesome, like the poor kid was attacked by a crow bar. Then, Billy and I hid behind a few trees and waited for the first car to drive by.
Sure enough, the very first driver who saw Terry lying there slammed on his breaks and got out of the car to see if the kid was okay. But, as soon as the driver opened the car door, Terry jumped up and ran away towards the forest, just like I told him to do. Billy and I could hardly stand it! We laughed so hard that we fell down in the snow. We would have stayed there laughing for a while because the look on the driver’s face was so funny. But, the driver never got back into his car. Instead, he chased Terry right into the forest, calling to him, “Don’t worry, boy! I’m just trying to help you!” I knew that all three of us would be in serious trouble if the man caught up with Terry, so Billy and I ran toward him and told him to follow us to the right, down Bayview. Our friend Kevin lived on that street, so we climbed over his fence and hid behind his garage until the man finally gave up and walked back to his car.
Then, we went to Billy’s house for lunch, but only after washing the red paint out of Terry’s hair.
April 6, 1970
Sayville, New York
This is my last year at the parochial middle school with those awfully strict and boring nuns. Next year, my sister Mary and I are going to Sayville high school with our friend Elaine and will never have to wear these ugly uniforms again. Although I liked that most of my cousins went to this school, I am glad to be leaving the nuns. They enjoy punishing and humiliating students for no apparent reason! If they catch you chewing gum, they make you stick it on your nose for the rest of the day. And, if you forget your hat for chapel, you have to wear a tissue on your head. I always had to wear a tissue during chapel. These punishments didn’t even come close to the nun’s most powerful weapon against sin—the trashcan. From outside the classroom building, a few big trashcans were periodically pulled inside a classroom for perpetrators to stand inside with their arms held out horizontally. The trashcans were so tall that most students were held up by their armpits and could not reach the bottom with their feet.
But I no longer worry about trashcans, because today was the big day. I heard that three years ago, James and Margaret were able to steal wine from the chapel and drink it during their lunch break. Kevin, a boy from my homeroom, agreed to help me with the wine-operation, since he had a key to the sacristy. We arranged for a group of our friends to form an assembly line near the chapel. We each took turns drinking wine from the bottles inside the sacristy and then filling them back up with water. None of us drank enough wine to get drunk, but that was not our goal. The real accomplishment was that we got away with the operation without getting caught!
Well, I almost got away with it. After drinking wine, I chewed a piece of gum to get the smell of wine out of my mouth. In the class after lunch, a nun noticed my gum. Since I had been caught too many times for chewing gum, I was sentenced to the trashcan for the rest of the day. I dragged the trashcan into the classroom and stood up inside it. However, I knew that this time, the trashcan wouldn’t be so bad.
May 16, 2005
Sugar Land, Texas
My parent’s friends Billy and Laurie and my mom’s sister Mary visit today, and I can’t wait until they begin telling stories about Long Island. These five old friends, who have known each other since childhood, radiate something invisible but entirely tangible when they revisit their pasts. Sometimes I feel the ocean-spray on my check, or the sand between my toes and little pieces of seaweed tickling my heels. Their voices carry the smell of Hut’s hamburger stand—the smell of burning grease mixed with a salty breeze from the Great South Bay.
Some of my favorite memories aren’t mine at all, but those that I have inherited from my parents. I remember skating on the bay when it froze over, almost falling in one year after being chased by growing cracks in the ice. I went clamming in the bay with my father and then joined him for a few beers after a hard day’s work. These are some of the things I remember, but have not actually experienced. I have not consciously replaced my own childhood memories with those of my parents. However, a void in my past yearned to be filled and chose the most colorful stories it could find. Where did color exist in Sugar Land? Are meticulously manicured lawns really green? When artificial lakes are dyed to appease the aesthetic sensibilities of the suburban homeowners, is that color really blue?
I eagerly started the fire in our backyard coaxed the old friends to sit around it and once again sift through their memories of Long Island. My dad tells stories of growing up in Bayport. He and Billy remember when they were Boy Scouts and went camping on the beach. My mother and aunt describe memories of Sayville and of my aunt’s first car. Its driver’s seat was not bolted securely to the floor and would slide around the car while accelerating or stopping. The memories are so vivid and colorful that I feel I have witnessed them first hand.
I wonder why my memories don’t seem so colorful. I feel deprived of the childhood that my parent’s had.
October 24, 1994
Sugar Land, Texas
Today, I heard the word “sheltered” for the first time and learned what it means. My babysitter Macala told me about her friend who had tried to commit suicide by swallowing a full bottle of pills from her parent’s pill cabinet. She said that her friend has been acting strangely this past year. She began to think that she was a witch and could perform black magic. She dressed in black. Macala said that her friend attempted suicide because she was too sheltered. I asked what “sheltered” means. Macala said that children whose parents don’t let them do anything and who have to stay in their house all the time are sheltered.
July 24, 1996
Sugar Land, Texas
“There’s nothing to do here,” I said to my mom.
My mom replied, “Sure there is. When your father and I were young, we were poor, but we always found something to do. We would go to Hut’s to hang out and have a hamburger, and then walk along side of the bay watching the sunset. Sometimes, we would just walk around the streets, stopping by our friends’ houses along the way so that they could join us. There’s always something to do when you’re a kid.”
“But, there is no bay near Sugar Land. And, my only friend within walking distance is on vacation thisweek. You had so much more to do when you were my age. Why did you leave Long Island? Why do we live here?”
I saw a tinge of regret in my mother’s eyes as she briefly glanced downwards. In that moment, a flood of childhood memories passed through her consciousness and peeked through her eyes in the twinkling form of a tear. But, wiping that tear from her face and thoughts, she quickly responded as I expected she would, “We moved here because of your father’s job. We live in Sugar Land because it is a safe place to raise a family and has excellent schools.”
“But it’s boring here!” I complained, not realizing that I had crossed some line.
Indicating that a line had indeed been crossed, my mom became disproportionately upset. Her voice trembled as she spoke. I knew that my comment alone could not have caused her reaction to be so severe, and that other factors contributed to her response to my complaint. With a curious sense of urgency, she said, “Brian, your father and I have given up everything for you and your brother! We sacrificed our careers so that one of us could always be with you while you were growing up. We didn’t want you to be raised by babysitters and daycares. You have some nerve to say that you are bored when you are so fortunate.”
Then, my mother cooled down for a moment before continuing, “Your father and I did not have good childhoods. We were poor and our parents were divorced and didn’t care about us most of the time. We wanted you lives to be different.”
Not yet a confrontational teenager, I did not continue the conversation. I would have said that I am sheltered.
May 9, 2006
Austin, Texas
I know that it is time to confront my parents. I feel no bitterness toward them, and know that they tried to do their best to give me an ideal childhood. In fact, I think they were amazing parents and I feel very lucky to know that they care about me as much as they do. But, I feel empty. I can’t dig a single satisfactory memory from the crevices of my brain’s grey matter. No stored image triggers a pathway of positive emotions like those of my parent’s vivid memories of their past.
I want to tell my parents about this feeling of emptiness and that I wish they had let me make mistakes and discover the world on my own. I wish that I did not attend school in a “blue ribbon” school district and that I didn’t live in a cookie cutter house. But, I feel guilty doing this. I have been told over and over again that my childhood was due to the “sacrifice” of their lives, careers, and freedom to move to their dream-home in the country.
My parents do not realize how guilty their “sacrifice” has made me feel for most of my life, and the effects this feeling of guilt has had on me. Even I am unaware of many of the far-reaching effects of my feelings of guilt, although I can recognize a few ways I have responded to it. They wanted to foster a caring, stable, and safe environment for my upbringing. Not only did I feel guilty for the sacrifices they had to make for this goal, but also I felt responsible to help them achieve their goal. As a child, I was shy and rarely caused trouble. I excelled in school and was dedicated to swimming and boy scouts. Much of these behaviors that I had adopted were not entirely my own, but partially “dependency behaviors and false selves adopted because of family.”[2] I do not feel that these subservient and reserved behaviors reflect the character of my true self, but I still find myself struggling to escape my created self-image.
Cardinal Newman in his Idea of a University acknowledged our personal need to “find our own truth,”[3] hence the motto of the tower, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”[4] In the case of my family history, the truth has been a source of freedom for me. I now realize that my upbringing was not only a sacrifice, but also an excuse. My mother’s professional career was promising before she had me. She could have been at the top of her field, she tells me. But, I discovered that she didn’t back away from pursuing further success in her field simply because of my birth. She had her own barriers that had nothing to do with me. She is terrified of public speaking, which she would have had to master to progress in her career. My dad, too, has many personal blocks that prevent him from ascending professionally.
I understand Stephen Dedalus’s desire to “fly by those nets.” I can’t allow myself to feel bound to the history my parents have created for me. I have to forge a new history, new identity, and new direction. My memories are not colorful like those of my parents. But, the dull personal history that I perceive serves as a measure for my future. I am the director of my own life and now it is my job, not my parents, to fill my memory with colorful, vivid images that I can describe while reminiscing around the fire. To “develop my own character…requires awareness of all those patterns of thought, behavior, and emotion which I have inherited from my family system.”[5] It is this awareness that makes truth so liberating and empowers me to become the person I want to be and not to be the person I have become.
July 8, 2006
Cusco, Peru
I feel as if my past is unreal or incorporeal in some way. But, fortunately, I have started to create a new memory bank. This reassessment of my personal history begun at the University of Texas at Austin. Now, as I sit on the side of a Peruvian mountain range, the only direction I can see is forward, into the future. For the rest of my life, my memory is my responsibility and my goal is to make it as colorful as possible.
Endnotes
[1] James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin Group, 1977), 98
[2] Jerome Bump, “Jane Eyre and Family Systems Therapy,” Course Anthology B, 389
[3] Course Anthology A, Vol 1, 320.
[4] John 8:31
[5] Course Anthology A, Vol 1, 320.
Works Cited
- The Bible
- “Newman and the Concept of the Liberal Arts.” Course Anthology A, Vol. 1. (319-320).
- Bump, Jerome. “Jane Eyre and Family Systems Therapy.” Course Anthology B.
- Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Group, 1977.