Richard Dansky

Memory hits in the damndest places.

Halfway across the Atlantic, for example. It’s the day after a business trip to Paris, and I’m bone-weary. The flight is full; no empty seats for stretching out this time, and the woman in front of me had reclined her seat into my lap even before takeoff. A coworker’s got the seat next to mine, intent on her portable DVD player and hoping vaguely that nobody’s seated a kid where they can see the gory vampire shenanigans unfolding onscreen. The in-flight movie’s a non-starter, not with the back-of-seat screen shoved down roughly to the level of the oddly shaped pizza that passes for an in-flight meal.

So I doze. A baseball podcast I’ve heard five or six times before loops on my headphones, lulling me to sleep with promises of slugging third basemen who’ve reported to camp in the best shape of their life. Outside, it’s a grey airplane wing keeping me from seeing grey clouds over grey water. I close my eyes and try to sleep, wearily aware that the 5AM wakeup call I’d set for myself was midnight back home, that the trip had been too short for anything but wallowing in jet lag, and that I normally don’t go to bed until two hours, body clock time, after the damnable French alarm clock had gotten me up.

(A note to the curious traveler: French hotel rooms almost never feature clocks, alarm or otherwise. They have television sets with clocks and alarms built into their bases, and said television is generally plugged into the one available wall socket near whatever passes for a desk and thus serves as an appropriate spot for a laptop. If you’re going to use your laptop, you must first unplug the television/clock/alarm. This leads to untold quiet panic when you finish, plug the TV back in, and attempt to reset the clock manually so as to avoid the possibility of setting it wrongly, oversleeping, missing your plane, and being stranded in France without  any clean socks as a result. This somehow never ends up being a problem, however, as the sheer worry over the possibility of a possibly incorrect clock translates nicely to a night full of panic-stricken awakenings every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. But I digress.)

And so I doze, and I remember a night, fifteen years gone. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just a memory of driving around a part of Boston called Allston on a rainy fall night, trying to find a parking space near a friend’s house.

Then I wake up, and I think about what had just crawled out of my subconscious. There was no particular reason for this memory to emerge, nothing on the trip that would invoke it. There was nothing coming up that would summon it, either – no trips to Boston, no visits to the friend’s house I was seeking in memory. Hell, it wasn’t even the right time of year.

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually dozed back off, right back into that same memory. Back into the bare black tree trunks along the narrow streets, slick with rain as water dripped off the branches. Back into the long straight drive along the cemetery wall that marked the edge of the neighborhood, with the distant sound of the Commonwealth Avenue traffic whispering on through. Back to shining, cold streets twisting and turning past too-tall, too-thin houses squeezed in against one another like an overcrowded bookshelf. Back to a moment and a time long gone, one that hadn’t seemed particularly significant when it happened.

At that point I shook myself awake again at that point, a bit confused, a bit restive. There was a bit of brow-furrowing as I tried to figure out why this particular memory had chosen this particular moment. Nothing about it stood out; I seemed to recall that at the time, I was mostly more irritated than anything else over the complete and utter lack of parking to be had. I was late, or at least I remembered being late, and being irritated with myself for precisely that reason. And being late, and being on the hunt for parking, I spent those moments staring at the serried rows of cars that wrapped up both sides of those Allston streets. I didn’t look at those trees. I didn’t look at that cemetery wall.

Or at least, I didn’t think I did. Yet here they were, vivid in memory, in imagination.

I stayed up for a while, played for a little while on my Nintendo DS, read a bit of one of the books I’d brought with me. Put on my iPod, too, with fancy noise-reduction headphones and a whole lot of writing music on the hard drive. All of that bought me an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then I was out again, back in Allston, a passenger in memory.

Truth be told, I was no closer to figuring out why that memory had emerged. As I write this, I must confess, I still don’t know. What I do know is that all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that memory was there for the taking. White streetlamps reflected off the road, purple clouds scudding overhead, sidewalks humping up at odd angles because of over-aggressive tree roots – all of them were available. I didn’t remember seeing any of this at the time, but clearly I did, clearly I had, because now it was all there for the taking. Yes, the memory of annoyance lingered, along with hints of panic and urgency and oh-Jesus-I’m-late-again-and-they’re-gonna-kill-me. But that’s not what matters now. What I see, what I remember are those black branches, twisted in the thin bits of moonlight. It’s the solitary man walking his dog, seeing me cruise by and turning away. It’s the hiss of tape in the cassette deck and water under the tires,  the creak of worn-out windshield wipers and the thunk of a suspension that was never made for Boston potholes.

And all of that is now available, waiting to be summoned up again. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had, of things I didn’t realize I’d seen. But they were there, surely enough, real enough to be picked up out of the corner of my eye and kept against the day when they were needed, or wanted, or perhaps just worth taking a look at once again. I’m sure I’ll find a use for those trees sooner or later. Maybe not in the book I’m working on now, maybe not for a while, but they’re in the inventory, there to be called upon when I need them. The same goes for the sounds of that night, and for the wet stone wall with its locked cemetery gates and array of empty beer bottles standing sentinel up top, and for every other bit of that evening that’s told me it was important enough to stay with me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’m sure there are other memories like that, waiting for their moment to emerge, using their own inscrutable logic to decide when they’re needed. I’ll welcome them, and look forward to revisiting what they have to show me. I’ll look forward to seeing what they can give me for the next story, or the one after, the found gems of memory that I didn’t know I needed at the time. The readers need never know where those pinched, angular houses came from, or how that cemetery gate was just a flash in a rearview. They don’t need to know, and they never will. It’s enough that I do, and that for whatever reason, at whatever time, I remembered where to look for them.