365 Memories

Thinking about high school friends. Friends from my second high school, that is. A place I entered under cover of deep Michigan snow, in the middle of my sophomore year. Spring semester, summer vacation, then back for one more term before having to take a medical leave. These events are all detailed in other posts. But what I remember today is this: an unexpected gesture from a friend I didn't even know I had. A handcrafted gift I have kept and cherished since the age of sixteen. With all the moves I've made, it's perhaps a miracle that this gift has not been broken—it is fragile, fired clay—and yet it makes sense: I have taken more than the usual care with it. The object in question is a plate, glazed in dove gray with an abstract crosshatch of lavender, peat, and twilight sky. It was made expertly by a boy in my school, in the ceramics studio, and given to my mother to pass along to me once she'd made the trip up north, alone, to clean out my room toward the end of th...

Forty-three years ago, in the Greek Orthodox Church of Sts . Constantine and Helen, in Detroit, Michigan, my parents were married in a traditional wedding ceremony. Of course I don't remember this event; I was born three years, three months, and three weeks later. But a fascination set in long ago, and I remember looking at albums, at the square-format photos with thick cardboard backing, photos now bleached out with light exposure and age . . . Without the photo in front of me (I swear it), I can remember the exact orange-pink shade of the roses my mother carried, the cream color and elegant tailored cut of her sleeveless dress. I see her in profile: slim body, head angled down, youthful skin with full, flawless cheeks, the merest hint of a smile like a pale Mona Lisa. I see my father, brown suit (or was this just the discoloration of the print?) draped on a "tall, dark, and handsome" man. Not a trace of silver in his hair yet. He, too, looks fairly serious, but complete...

Along with sunshine and the reggae beat of UB 40 coming from a friend's boom box by the lake at my Michigan boarding school, late spring in 1985 brings another memory: the first "real" kiss. I was fifteen years old, school would dismiss for the summer in a few short weeks, and when I came back in September, I'd be another couple weeks shy of turning sixteen. Sweet sixteen and . . . never been kissed? I remember feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I didn't much care. On the other, I knew that I was supposed to care, so it began to bother me. And springtime conspires to create young love. And there was this one guy who seemed kind of interesting, a little different—though it's hard to remember now exactly what it was that struck me as unusual. Maybe it was the way he dressed. He was tall and slim, and clothes draped nicely on him. He had very blond hair, and the brightness of it was emphasized by his choice of wearing mostly white. He wore linen, I think; he w...

It's mid-May and gray today. Unseasonably cool temperatures. Hard to recall days of sunshine and nothing doing, but that's really all I'm fit for in my wishful-thinking mode. So what I remember is this: Warm sand between my toes, finally. Fifteen years old, the thaw of my first real Michigan winter; snow and icicles gone, rain and mud gone, and the sun working its late-spring magic on my sour, pale-skin self. My school at the time was situated between two lakes, adjacent to State Park property. In the spring, shanties for ice fishing gave way to calm blue water, gentle waves carrying sparks of light. Between or after classes, I would head with friends to a two-story, yellow-painted structure by a small patch of beach—the boat launch location for summer camp students. Throughout the year, we'd head there to talk or not talk, to smoke or not smoke, to sulk or to smile as our mercurial moods demanded, and very often to listen to music. We listened to a lot of classic rock ...

It's raining again. I love the sounds of the city in the rain: the slip slap of wipers, the swoosh of tires on wet pavement, the tapping of drops blown by the wind against my high-rise windows. I relish the sounds—plus the sight of taillights and neon dragging their long, rippling reflections through the blacktop of the avenues—but I confess I've become a curmudgeon about getting wet. I love the rain most when I'm warm and dry inside. When did that happen? I hadn't realized. I'm sure it was my son in his big rubber boots and his slick jacket; my son who, despite loving the thing, never wants to take his umbrella out when it's raining—I'm sure it was his enthusiasm for puddles and his wanting to stick his tongue out to catch the drops that made me see how old I've become, if not in years necessarily then sometimes in attitude. Who is this person, cursing the feel of cold water seeping through an ill-sealed sole? Who is this person carrying an umbrella? I ...

Part I One of the last memories I have of my maternal grandmother's life (or was it actually the last firsthand memory?) is from a time, blurry in date, when my mother and I visited her in an apartment on the outskirts of Detroit. The memory involves a pet bird. Yiayia was in her quite-late eighties, I believe, and definitely at the end of her independent-living days. She was moved not long after this to a retirement home, where I don't believe I ever saw her. (I am actually not too upset by this, since she was a fiercely independent woman by nature, and it seems more appropriate to remember her living in her own home.) At this time, she did have in-home visits from an aide, daily I think; I am not sure if I should properly call the woman a nurse. My grandmother was at the beginning of a mental decline that ended in . . . I suppose it was some form of dementia. But for the time being, she was still quite functional, just maybe a little less sharp in hearing, memory, and conve...

Jack of Diamonds, Queen of Spades. Those are the cards that form the combination known as a "pinochle" in the game of the same name. When I was little, I'm sure the first card game I learned was either "Go Fish" or "Old Maid" (I remember the Old Maid cards from my paternal grandparents' Florida house). Not long after, I progressed to "War," "Crazy Eights." I played those with my parents, often to pass the time on airplanes, back when the airlines still had decks of cards to distribute free of charge (along with "wings" pins; now you're lucky if they'll give you peanuts and a half can of soda with your outrageously priced economy ticket). There were various forms of solitaire, regular and clock. Eventually the repertoire included "Spit," a fast-slapping game that I'm pretty sure I learned at camp while bunking with a bunch of other pre -teens. We also played some version of poker there, assigning a...

Detroit in the 1970s. My aunt (my mother's sister, the eldest child out of six in the family) had a finished basement in her house, and she would host large family parties there—often I think, although pretty soon after my birth, we left the Detroit area and so were too far away to participate in many of these celebrations. I think I attended two of the parties, but even to me, it felt like a ritual occurrence, such was the welcoming atmosphere, the instant acceptance of family. Jean and Louis (my aunt and uncle), plus their grown kids and my cousins once removed (who were closer in age to me than my first cousins), opened their home and their hearts, their basement and their kitchen to us all. I was very young, so I don't remember much, nor do I trust the memories I do have; they may just be associations. Mostly I remember two things, and the first is culinary. When we came through the front door of the house (or maybe it was a side door? I have an image of a set of two doors,...

The middle of a Michigan winter. Darkness slipped down around us early, and we would move in a huddle of coats and hats and scarves that, if they covered our faces, would trap our breath and the smell of damp wool next to our mouths. We didn't care how cold it was; we wanted to be outside, where everything seemed still, the silence broken only by our own voices and the sound of our feet crunching across snow, our footsteps and teenage banter made louder in contrast with the surrounding quiet. We would lie down on the tennis courts that were beyond Faculty Lane, on the other side of the highway from the main campus buildings, near the summer camp's "High School Boys" area. During the academic year, there was really no reason for any of us to be on that side of the highway—then again, it seemed we were often where we had no business being. We'd lie on our backs, side by side on the cold clay courts, a chill pushing through our padded layers, reaching up and down our...

January 1985. At fifteen years old, I was an angry ex-dancer; passion crushed, career shunted. It seemed so true, that statement about not going home again. After being on my own at fourteen, across the country from my parents in order to pursue a dream that didn't work out, there was no question of going back to a "normal" high school, no desire to live at home, despite my parents' support (or maybe because of it—I didn't want sympathy or for anyone to say they'd been afraid this kind of thing would happen). So, I was once again the "new girl" at another boarding school for artists, and that was fine; I could remake myself into anything at all: drama major, costume designer, metalsmith , photographer. Assuming, of course, that my parents and I made it through the whiteout. We had just arrived in Traverse City, Michigan, had found the school some 14 miles away, situated between two frozen lakes, abutting State Park land, and we were heading out to fi...