Build Here

Walking along the shore, I observe the houses, all the same. Gray shingles, brightly colored Adirondack chairs, pink geraniums in clay planters. If I lived here, I’d find it humdrum. I’d want a gold aluminum sided house.

I don’t live here, so the neighborhoods on the whole charm me into buying souvenirs, trinkets that don’t match my standard suburban home. Silver jewelry, polished stones to fill a glass bowl, a conch shell for the bathroom vanity. None of these souvenirs holds much meaning for us. They will eventually be gifted or stored.

As a child, I lived family vacations through a camera lens. I snapped pictures of the beach, the crabs, the seagulls, even the swimming pool at the hotel. The pictures, returned from Fotomat, that small blue booth in the Kmart parking lot, were terrible. The film was overexposed, typically, showing an yellowish orange haze, because while on the beach I insisted on swapping out roll after roll in the bright sun. I wanted to keep a steady stream of picture-taking.

In addition to snapping too many photos, I clamored for too many souvenirs: figurines of seagulls, wire legs stuck into driftwood; miniature lobster traps; and jewelry made from polished shells. A little Cape Cod to take home to my room in Connecticut. My parents spent about $70 worth on "cheap" souvenirs to appease me. My room already burgeoned full of pewter figurines, stuffed animals, and Smurfs. But I needed the driftwood with the seagull.

On the beach, I collected the shells of dead horseshoe crabs, nondescript and mostly broken shells, and -- the most coveted prize -- glass smoothed and frosted by the sea, which we called, aptly, "sea glass." I marveled at sea glass because glass was not allowed on the beach, yet the ocean washed it ashore. With its edges gone, the glass proved mutable and harmless to a bare foot.

Souvenirs are one thing, and memories are quite another. I didn’t learn the value of a memory until I attended college, and my father died my second semester, leaving me stranded in Indiana with a pile of souvenirs and a whole lot of emotional baggage. I tried, so hard, to write him back to me. I studied photos, but they couldn't bring him back. I couldn't hear his voice. I couldn't imagine his hugs.

I took an Expository Writing class that semester, and I aced it. After missing critical time in my science classes (I was a biology major) for funerals and grieving, I changed my major. Writing was something I could do, and do well. My plan was to record my story. That story would be meaningful to other people, therapeutic to me, and all-around you know, brilliant. It wasn't.

I signed up for the Writing Practicum so that I could work as a writing consultant in the Writing Lab, the “W-Center,” my junior and senior years. As a writing consultant, I culled ideas from other students' papers. I absorbed content from classes I didn't take, such as Political Science and Sociology, but I also studied which papers were the most engaging to read, which had phrases that popped with color, ones that went Clunk!, and ones that paled into a sea of faded, gray type. I collected the best, and discarded the rest. Then I affixed my own details to a hodge-podge of other people's technique. Surely this plan would buy me where I needed to go.

My writing sought to resuscitate my past, and never took flight because of it. Because of positive feedback early on, I was over-confident, and because of harsh criticism to "take me down a few notches," I became, ultimately, under-confident. I simply stopped believing in myself, the same way I stopped believing my dad ever existed. If I could write about Shakespeare and pull an "A," but not my own father, well, then what?

Still, I tried to find my memory, adding a misplaced detail here, an ill-conceived detail there. Quick! We ate borscht for Easter, stuffed celery for Thanksgiving. Who cooked it. What did it taste like. Who am I? I wrote about everything -- except the one memory I was chasing down. I was all technique, no content. I was a great writing consultant, a terrible writer.

No matter how many times I "wrote my dad," I never recaptured our summers on the beach. The expanse of details took up space, and over time, lost their meaning.I lived through writing, not for it, or even because of it. My writing was another camera, with a thick, dirty lens.

I am forty now, the age when I should forget, when memory begins to fade, and yet memory returns to me.

Memory returns through life relived. The family children watching baseball and car races with their dads. The family kids heading to college. I am an aunt, cousin, and niece. I am a wife. I live in a beautiful suburban house, not unlike my childhood home. We vacation, still, on Cape Cod. We collect new shells and crabs, and buy polished stones.

The presence of being creates memory that gives of its own imperfect life. Those memories rush home, to my house, to my family, my life, and say, Build here.