Blueberry Fool: Memory, Moments, and Meaning by Thom Rock

Author:Thom Rock [Rock, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Religion
ISBN: 9781630875695
Publisher: Resource Publications
Published: 2011-07-15T07:00:00+00:00

Forgetting Fireflies

My sister doesn’t recall our firefly walk. “Fireflies, really?” she asks confusedly. “And I was there? I mean maybe you went for the walk without me.” But no, I distinctly remember the both of us giggling and glowing, fireflies alight in our hands, in our pockets; a potent and cherished image from our childhood. Have I distorted the past, then? Or have I just made it up? I wouldn’t do that. Would I? Or has she forgotten this moment I’ve carried with me and taken care of ever since we were small? And what about the others who walked with us on that summer night that may or may not have happened? Was our mother there? Was our father? Maybe I caught fireflies all by myself. I have no yellowed photographs with which to prove any of it. All I have is a memory.

If I could provide some flash and click of proof I would show you another scene, this one from the Catskill Game Farm: my sister and I laughing again and pointing to the goat as it stuck its obscene tongue through the fence to pluck a yellow plastic chrysanthemum from our mother’s new wicker handbag. She is oblivious to the caprine prank and continues feeding grain to the others at the petting zoo. Our father, having provided for his family penny feed from the gumball machine that dispensed grain instead of candy, would lift the camera, if there had been one, up to his smiling eyes.

Or on a wayside picnic the camera might catch our mother swinging her hand in the air, as if she were already waving goodbye, trying to convince a bee to land elsewhere. Here, her curly locks have been replaced by a thin, straight pixie cut after a grueling round of radiation and chemotherapy. Her children eat fluffernutter sandwiches at the picnic table while her brother and his wife fill water jugs from the cool mountain spring.

Or the picture that flashes across my mind so often, always unbidden: my younger self at my mother’s burial standing in the dusty ribbon of the backcountry road that curves around the old family cemetery.

The tattered memory itches at my brain, though, for when I consider the details of it carefully, I cannot say for sure that the road is in fact dirt. Something makes me want to say that maybe the road is paved. So which is it, tar or dirt? I used to know. But the memory is of me standing in the dust and does not feel the same when I picture my feet planted on pavement.

Have I simply invented it all?

Another memory comes to mind. It is the last time I’ll see my mother alive, the night she started to have seizures and her friend told my sister to bring me to my room so I wouldn’t see. At least I think that’s what happened. I have forgotten how I got to my room, whether Terri walked me, held me by the hand, or I brought myself there.

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