And what will they remember?
I woke up at four this morning, harrassed Ed out of bed, gathered our few unpacked things, drank some coffee, whispered good-bye to my parents and then carried the sleeping children to the car so we could get back to Philadelphia without risking another huge traffic snarl and in time for their art class.
Naturally, although I was as gentle as I could be, the children woke up and we started our drive with two button bright passengers. Daniel threw his conversational gear stick straight into fifth and talked almost non-stop until we were on the New Jersey turnpike. He talked about the street lights, the bridge lights, whether he would be able to see the Astronomer’s Tower like yesterday and whether it would be all lit up. He discussed whether the George Washington Bridge was the longest bridge of the three we cross between Bayside and Philadelphia or whether the Frog’s Snack (Throgs Neck) Bridge is. He mused on Cheerios, codes and the moons of Jupiter. Helena, although quiet, stared out the window with eyes wide open.
When I was a child, we often drove in the wee small hours, lured by the clear roads and the cooler night air, especially as the car had no airconditioning. Five hour drives to Concord would sail past while my sisters and I (stretched out in the backseat of a 1969 Chevrolet) would watch the street lights glimmer, the telephone wires swoop and dip and the shades of trees against the lightening sky. We’d try to guess how close we were by how the car was moving and the shape of the telephone poles. We would arrive at our aunt’s house at breakfast time and be swept into a world of laughing older cousins where there were cereals with artifical coloring and sugar, where there was Fluff to put on peanut butter sandwiches and we could pick corn, shuck it and drop it straight into the boiling water. We would have weeks when ice cream happened every night and the television stayed on and we could drive the milk truck on the farm roads, sitting on my cousin John’s lap. At the end, we’d be taken from our beds in the middle of the night again and watch the sky turn back towards home.
I still like driving towards dawn. I like how the world glows around you before slipping into full sunlight, almost without you noticing. I like watching the streetlamps lose out to the rising sun and the shrouded world around you clearing and sharpening. This morning, I wondered whether this trip was writing itself into the children’s memory, whether they too would remember the sun coming up and the night disappearing, as if we had left it behind in New York.
What they remember, however, is their secret and is part of what will make them increasingly mysterious as they age. Maybe someday one of them will mention remembering the time we gave up trying to get home one day and then drove home the next morning so early that it was still dark. And maybe I will have forgotten.
Beautiful stuff, memories. Beautifully remembered.