I had two Memorial Day services to attend this year, and in whizzing up the Maine Turnpike from the first one in New Hampshire to the second one - the first such service our little rural town has put on - I got a speeding ticket. It's a whopping big fine (over $200), which I'm going to contest based on my perfect driving record and years of community service. Well, at least I can try.
But after the New Hampshire service, I found myself reluctant to pull myself away from the typical reunion-like reminiscence that always takes place when adult children of lost submariners get together around our explicit commonality. It's rare when complete strangers talk so intimately from the get-go, and we tend to overlook the fact that we've never met before, and the talk explodes with revelations. There's no chit-chat. Talk's stripped down to urgent stories that we've got to get out before we run off to other services or family events.
And so A., a lady whose dad went down on the WWII submarine Albacore, told me about the smell of stewed tomatoes, while her partner peeled off from us in search of normal conversation. A. fit what I've come to recognize as the paradigm of adults who lost their dads early in life: they don't start researching their dads till some event cracks them open in middle-age. A's event was the sound of an old-time kid's bicycle bell, which - when she looked into it, she found was the signal of the WWII telegram delivery man when he brought wives the terrible news that their husbands' boats were overdue and presumed lost.
When A. heard the bicycle bell that put her on the trail of her father, she was 47. Some kids were going by on the sidewalk outside her house, the bell sounded, and the portals of memory opened up like a powerful sixty-year-old wind blowing through her head. A bedroom in her grandparents' house; her mother crying; sitting on a yellow and white quilt on the bed; the smell of stewed tomatoes.
A. called up her mother and said that she had some questions about her childhood, but wanted her mother to first just listen to her version so that she - A. - could know if she was remembering right. After listening, her mother confirmed the memory: it was the day the telegram had come, when A. was just five. Like many wives with small children, A.'s mother and A. were living with A.'s grandparents while A.'s father was at sea. The grandparents had been canning tomatoes in the kitchen when A. and her mom heard the telegraph man's delivery bell from their upstairs bedroom.
Another urgent outpouring was from L., who told us how she was only just now realizing the traits she had inherited from her dad, who went down on the submarine Thresher. She mentioned all the volunteer work she does, and we agreed that many of us carry (suffer, in my case; I hate committee-work) that strong sense of civic duty that our fathers had to have to serve in submarines. She also talked about how calm she is in a crisis, and we reflected on how this trait had to have come from her father; prospective submariners were screened for their ability to suppress the natural reaction of fight or flight in emergencies, and keep quiet as well as calm. I had a sudden flashback to thirty-some years ago when I'd been stacking firewood in our driveway, and the woodpile collapsed on my hand, crushing a finger. A praeternatural calm came over me as I quietly told our six year-old daughter to run inside and call Dad to come home right away from work. She'd seen the blood and knew it was an emergency, but was able to dial the correct number right away and calmly ask for her father. We got to the hospital and had the hand numbed and stitched up without incident, and I'd always thought - till this Memorial Day - that it was for our daughter's sake that I had stifled all my natural crisis-responses. I'd thought it was something that all mothers with young kids have. I'm lucky enough not to have had more occasions to test this belief in the years since.
I have another WWII orphan friend who figured out late in life that the recurrent nightmare she's had ever since she was a child likely stemmed from that fateful day when her mother received the "overdue, presumed lost" telegram. I've written about it here before so I'll just summarize: D. would wake up in a sweat after dreaming of being suffocated, with a woman's scream in the background. She took a roadtrip in her late fifties with her aged mother to all the significant places her mom had been with her dad. The trip revived her mother's fifty year-old memories, and she told D. that on the terrible day, D.'s paternal grandmother answered the door, read the telegram and started screaming. D.'s mother, upstairs, grabbed baby D. out of her crib and ran downstairs. When she saw D.'s grandmother with the telegram, she knew. D.'s grandmother stopped screaming enough to help the telegram man, still in the door, to pry D.'s mother's fingers from the baby, who was turning blue as her mother, in a daze of grief, desperately clutched her against her chest.
This is what Memorial Day, blessedly, has turned into since I woke up in middle-age and went on the trail of my father.
Memory triggers are ephemeral things; unexpected, flashing both brightly and quickly - yet strangely telescoped, like polaroid images seen through a cardboard tube.
Stewed tomatoes, a bicycle bell, nightmare screams; all common but very evocative sensory things.
As I sit here, I allow my mind to drift through my more accessible memories, and I am acutely aware of the various associations: fried potatoes, river catfish, gunpowder from fireworks, chlorine swimming pool water, fresh peaches, stale cigarette butts stuffed in empty beer cans, rosin on a violin bow, mud pies, White Shoulders perfume, and a myriad of others.
For several years I have had no sense of smell. Mostly my memory fills the gaps, but I miss the sudden revelations that come pouring in when a certain fragrance or odor is in the air.
I still have the other senses; music can bring about old and new recollections, but nothing is quite as powerful and gut-grabbing as scent.
Good luck with the ticket, ML!
And thanks for sharing with this great post.
Posted by: Cowtown Pattie | June 10, 2008 at 11:32 AM
Very, very evocative post, Mary Lee.
Even after having read your marvelous book, each new story that I hear from you touches me. So many children left fatherless and the repercussions continue emotionally all these years later. Such an impact on so many families.
Thanks so much for sharing more of this story here with us.
BUT........the ticket! UH OH! Didn't you tell the cop "I'm a famous author on the way to a very important meeting!" Hmmm....maybe that wouldn't have helped....lol Seriously, sorry about your lead foot....opps! I mean your ticket. (smile)
Posted by: Terri | June 14, 2008 at 02:56 PM