Conjuring up images of the past
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
It used to be easy. More than easy. It was like breathing. It happened without thought. I'd be driving - past my old school, Tower Hill, where my best friend, Rosemary, and I used to play; past the halfway point, where Rosemary and I used to meet; past St. Bernadette's Church, where my husband and I were married. And I'd see these places exactly as they had been, 10, 20, 30 years before - Tower Hill School hidden behind a hedge of lilacs so thick you could smell them from the next block; the halfway point all woods and swamp and orange lilies; St. Bernadette's so new it looked placed, not built, on the black macadam.
What was real was right before me - a sprawling school, the lilacs gone; houses where the trees used to be; a tired looking church. But superimposed, for an instant, was the past. And it was as clear and sharp as a photo.
This magic wasn't confined to Randolph. I'd be in Cambridge and see the house on Windsor Street where my father grew up, though it was torn down years before. I'd be in Inman Square and see the bar where my grandmother worked, though that's long gone, too. I'd be at the South Shore Plaza, and Cummings and Lauriat's and the outdoor mall the plaza used to be would reappear for a second.
But this doesn't happen anymore. I have to try to see things now. I have to stop and squint to find the past, because it's like a fleet of ships sailing toward the horizon, some disappearing even as I watch.
I was with my daughter, Lauren, and two of my grandchildren last week at TD Banknorth Garden, not Boston Garden anymore. Not Boston Garden for a long, long time. And we were in a suite, not a regular seat, seeing "Disney on Ice: Finding Nemo," not a rodeo. And the magic happened. Only for a second, but it was real and I was stunned because there I was in this place but at a rodeo, too, sitting beside my father again. I know. It's not the same place, not the same roof or floor or seats or anything. Everything is different now, the structure, the people, the world, me. But underneath, in the earth beneath this building, in the rocks, in the empty spaces between girders and concrete, like in the catacombs, like in me, something remains of what was. I know this, because I felt it. Just for an instant, but it was real.
"My father took me to the rodeo here. Well, not here exactly. But close. He took me every year," I told my daughter, who knows this because she's heard it at least 100 times. It's my walking-uphill-both-ways-to-school story. My father took me to the rodeo every year. And I wore a cowgirl hat and rubber boots because I didn't have real cowboy boots. We saw the Range Rider and Roy Rogers, my father and I. And cowgirls with ponytails and cowboys who rode bulls. And lasso tricks and guns twirling. This is what I remember.
But what I saw again in the magic of a second, clearly, all these years later, superimposed, as crisp as a photo, was this: Gene Autry just as he was when I was 4 or 5, my favorite cowboy. And me in my cowgirl hat and red boots, my father beside me. The image was gone in a flash but the memory lingered - Gene Autry singing one of his songs, walking down the aisle, kids screaming, me screaming because he was so close that if my arms had been longer I could have reached out and touched him; reaching for my father instead, my young, curly-haired father, in his plaid-flannel shirt, grinning simply because I was.
My grandchildren are 3 and 4. Will they remember any of Nemo on ice? The vanilla ice cream with the sprinkles? The Nemo hats? The giant shark? The music? Lauren and me beside them? Maybe. Maybe it's all inside us, everything, buried under other things, not a ship at all. No horizon, no boats marked "Childhood" and "Summer afternoons" and "Good times" eventually lost to sight.
Maybe the past is simply hidden under yesterday and last month and last year, under all the days and years between then and now. Entombed, yes, until something stirs them up - a building, a carnival smell, and two children in Nemo hats laughing and clapping their hands.
