Memory: Where all is safe

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My friend Anne e-mails me an excerpt from "Listening to Your Life," a book of daily meditations by Frederick Buechner. I find it on my computer at 5 a.m.

It is dark. The house is quiet, and I feel a little like the shoemaker in the old children's tale. I tiptoe downstairs to find that someone has been working while I've been sleeping, a pair of shoes on the workbench already made. An idea on the computer, already hatched.

Buechner's words are packed with truth and wisdom: "I pick the children up at the bottom of the mountain where the orange bus lets them off in the wind. They run for the car like leaves blowing. Not for keeps, to be sure, but at least for the time being, the world has given them back again, and whatever the world chooses to do later on, it can never so much as lay a hand on the having-beenness of this time.

"The past is inviolate. We are none of us safe, but everything that has happened is safe. In all the vast and empty reaches of the universe it can never be otherwise than that when the orange bus stopped with its red lights blinking, these two children were on it. Their noses were running. One of them dropped a sweater. I drove them home."

Upstairs, my youngest is sleeping, home from college for her grandmother's birthday, home still because she is sick and not yet well enough to return to her new, almost grown-up life.

The middle child is sleeping, too, and my husband, and even the dog. Only the oldest is somewhere else, at his apartment in New York. I love these moments, when they are all - or almost all - under the same roof and safe.

Sunday they were all home. The house was full of their sounds, Julie hoarse with fever, Lauren filling the teapot, Rob clomping around, their father talking, familiar sounds, a medley I sometimes ache for.

I made pancakes as I always do, and Rob drank a Coke as he always does because he doesn't like breakfast, and we sat at the kitchen table and it was so ordinary, like a million ordinary moments stored in time.

Nothing can "lay a hand on the having-beenness of this time." I love this idea. It comforts me. Sunday is safe, nothing can touch it. Nothing can change it.

The idea of memory being inviolate isn't new. "The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, they can't take that away from me." A few months before my mother died, I made a videotape of a young and healthy Dorothy, the girl my father married, and this song was its theme. I gave the tape to my father. I knew then the past couldn't be altered by the present, that it existed somewhere separately and that its existence was a gift.

But I never considered that this gift could be a refuge, too, that while "we are none of us safe . . . everything that has happened is safe." And that this all by itself is a reason to be grateful.

I've always believed it was unsafe to go back and remember, because you had to wade through so much of the past to get to a certain spot, and all that slogging through time, tinged what was. But Buechner seems to parachute into a moment. And when he gets there he looks around and enjoys it as it was, never mind what happened before or after, never mind all that's yet to happen.

Of course, there will always be yearning attached to memory, because it remains one-dimensional. That's what makes it bittersweet.

You can look at it, but you cannot embrace it. You can watch it unfold, but you cannot reach out and touch it. You can see the sweater the child has dropped, you can see even its tiny duck buttons, but as much as you ache to, you cannot pick it up and hold it to you and smell her smell and help her into it and hold her ever so briefly just one more time in your arms.