PENPAL
by
Dathan Auerbach
This book is dedicated to my mother
Memories
When I was younger, I took a job at a deli that had what the owner called an “ice cream buffet.” On Thursdays, children would get a free ice cream cone with their meals, and they could pick any one of the fifteen flavors we had. There were many times when a child had some understandable degree of difficulty selecting their preferred scoop, but eventually each kid would happily make their choice when the mom or dad urged them along — except, that is, for one little girl.
She couldn’t have been more than six, and when her father picked her up so that she could see through the glass, her face lit up as her eyes moved over all the different kinds of ice cream that were on display. When her dad asked her which flavor she wanted, she must have ignored the fact that he was not speaking about a plurality of scoops, and she excitedly named some and pointed to others. Gradually, the realization began to set in that she could only choose one kind of ice cream, and as I watched her try to pick just one flavor, I could see how anxious she was becoming. It wasn’t greed that beset her; it was the result of wanting many things equally but not having the emotional resources to settle arbitrarily on just one.
As the anxiety consumed her, she began to cry. There was no tantrum. She didn’t yell or pout. She simply could not choose. As her father was comforting her, I caught his eye and made a gesture. He nodded, and after a few seconds I leaned over the counter and called to her as I extended my hand. The little girl looked up to see me holding a cone towering with five different scoops of ice cream. Her mood was transformed instantly, and I can say with all sincerity that I have never seen another human being in such a state of pure jubilation. The father thanked me and saw to it that the girl did as well. They left, and we all moved on with our lives.
That was years ago, though my mind returns to that day for different reasons now and again. Most of the time I just think about how happy she was; but sometimes I think about how, despite her seemingly limitless joy that day, in all likelihood she probably doesn’t remember me or the ice cream. This doesn’t bother me. As children we have terrific and terrible times — events that, as we experience them, seem to be the most important things that have ever happened to us — but more often than not we forget them. Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.
But that’s just the nature of memory. The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven’t been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.
We all have voids in our narratives — lost time that we attempt to reclaim with best guesses. Most people have whole parts of their stories that they don’t realize are patchworks of guesswork, and those who do realize it aren’t likely to care. We want so badly to be happy — to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live — that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.
Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.
Some memories slip away through the cracks of our minds, but leave fibers behind so that we know there’s something missing. But this isn’t all bad. In fact, if we remembered every detail of every day, we might find ourselves so fixated on the past that most of our memories would be of us just sitting in a dark room thinking about all of our yesterdays — too focused on what was to care at all about what will be. And what of bad things? What of those things that we would wish had never happened if we could remember them? Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves, and when we do, it’s back to the void, and it’s time for more guesses toward a better life.
But sometimes you realize that the memories were always there — you just needed to be reminded. When this happens, it offers a previously lacked context for memories that, while never missing, were never understood. This is a special kind of gift. Our lives are so short that it seems a crime to squander any of it by forgetting. Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer. And that’s what we want. So we try to remember. But sometimes, when we do, we wish that we could just forget again.
But I remember.
The story that I’m about to tell you is the product of my own mental archaeology. Of course, like all great digs, how the artifacts fit together in a timeline is about as immediately clear as which things are important and which are not. Some parts of this story I have always remembered. Others were buried deeply, and some I simply never knew about and have only recently discovered. As is often the case, remembering one thing helps you remember another, and as you learn new things about your old life, memories that you thought were insignificant (or at the very least irrelevant) parts of your overall story are suddenly its foundation.
I began reconstructing and transcribing parts of this story on my own, and when I eventually and inevitably had questions, I turned to the only other person who could claim any amount of expertise concerning my history: my mother. Over the course of several weeks, my mother and I had a series of increasingly strained conversations, and it was through these talks that the importance of some forgotten, ignored, or never-known childhood events became clear. Looking back, these events all seem to fit so squarely that I can hardly believe they required reassembly at all. But what we notice in our lives, particularly as children, is so extraordinarily selective and contextualized that something ostensibly benign or self-contained can be transformed, by a single detail, into something terrible and pervasive. You just have to know what you’re looking for, and when you do, suddenly it’s all you can see.
Here, I’ve tried to preserve both my thoughts and experiences of my early life, as well as the gradual influx of new information, so that you might learn of these events as I experienced them. Parts of this story were written before I knew what I now know, all of which you will know by the end of this story, but I’ve kept the chapters as they were originally written. To the best of my ability, I have avoided contaminating my old memories with new revelations, and I’ve tried to be as faithful to the past as was possible when extrapolating from my earliest memories. What I offer you here is a combination of what I remember, what I’ve learned about my past from my mother, and what seems most likely; though my guesswork was restricted to gaps that are ultimately unimportant. If I was successful in all of this, then you will understand now as I understood then, and the pieces of my history will fall into place for you in very much the same way that they have only recently done for me.
Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.