For a Moment on a Sunday

A surprise memory from states away and years ago

“And in the humid-ever summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?” — John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water — it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of the sea.” — Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

3.24.2024

A few Sundays ago, I left my apartment and decided to wander north through Lincoln Park. It was one of the first warm days of the year in Chicago, and I stopped for a moment on the bridge over the south pond to look back at the city’s skyline and the fading blue afternoon sky behind it before continuing on. A cool breeze filled the air with the smell of fresh grass as the wildlife around the pond continued its soft and consistent chorus. For a moment, without any discernible reason, I was propelled back to some non-specific memory of a late-Spring or early-Summer evening in the backyard of our old house on Carrington Court. The memory, like the breeze that carried it, wasn’t summoned but was welcomed nonetheless.

Standing on the bridge, I was sent back to a similar twilight-blue sky stretching over the darkening wall of woods that bordered our old yard. I could practically see my dad standing at the Char Broil grill on the patio with a sweating Master’s cup of vodka seltzer with lime in his left hand and tongs in his right, almost ready to open the grill’s hood and release a cloud of aromatic smoke that would quickly disappear into the Georgia sky. I could almost hear my mom and Kendall from the white wicker chairs on the concrete porch, but not enough to quite make out the details of their conversation. Suddenly I was barefoot on the cool grass again, awaiting an airborne football that Will launched from the other side of the yard.

Nothing about the moment seemed fleeting.

Standing on the bridge, I felt surprised at the memory’s ability to ambush me with such an overwhelming sense of place. It wasn’t as specific as “remember that one time when,” but rather a full, impressionistic transportation to a nondescript moment: a moment that seemed to offer the strongest definition of the word “family” in its casual and comforting togetherness without special cause. It was before travel had to be scheduled weeks or months in advance to see each other for all but a few days; back when family meals didn’t have the pressure of being Family Meals and any pressures of adulthood were reserved for mom and dad and mercifully kept foreign to the rest of us. More than simply remembering what it was like when I was a kid, something about the combination of chirping birds and insects and the smell of the grass around the lake on that particular Sunday thrust me back into the moment to feel it; to experience the moment that I’d have undoubtedly found unremarkable at the time but now — looking back across an ocean of time that stretched over a decade — I found to be significant.

Turning from the bridge to continue my walk through the park, I struggled to determine if the sudden memory had left me more happy or sad.