365 Memories

Eight years ago today, my husband and I were watching stars in the night sky, listening to the sounds of a creek flowing through the Woodland Valley Campground in Phoenicia, NY. Woodland Valley is a beautiful site in the Catskills, at the foot of Slide Mountain, which is the range's highest peak. In our tent, we curled close together. We needed beauty, badly. Just four days earlier, our sense of normalcy was shattered, permanently, along with our sense of peace and protection, of safety and justice. A half-day previous, we'd met my father in Grand Central Station, and caught a train with him up to Connecticut. He'd been in the city for a meeting; we were heading out to borrow a car and escape to the mountains. It was the first time I'd seen either of my parents since the 9/11 attacks, and something in me cracked wide open when I saw my father's solid presence standing at the terminal's info booth, waiting. I hadn't realized how much I was feeling the shock...

Warning: the content of this post is not for the faint. On our way to and from a baseball game today (the New York–Penn Minor League), my son and I crossed New York Harbor on one of the cheerful orange boats that make up the Staten Island Ferry fleet. The ride was fabulous, passing Lady Liberty on calm waters, and the second round-trip we've made on the S.I. Ferry. I hope we'll do much more of this. The thing about the trip, though, was that it brought up a not-so-pleasant memory of another ferry ride, in June of 2006. My son was three years old then, and my parents were celebrating their ruby (fortieth) wedding anniversary. Despite how not romantic it might seem to celebrate a wedding anniversary with a daughter, son-in-law, and three-year-old grandchild in tow, this was how my parents wished to celebrate: with a family vacation to Block Island, Rhode Island. I had never been there, though I had heard wonderful things. The island lived up to its reputation—it was charming, l...

Father's Day is coming to an end. I have been thinking of my dad throughout the day, though, and wondering what I could possibly write to do him justice, to honor him. A lifetime of memories—forty years of them, shy some months—often simply blend into a constant, comforting knowledge: less a specific image or recalled dialogue, more just an ongoing certainty that he is there for me, always has been, in every interpretation of the phrase. We are bound by more than our blood, our cells, our DNA . . . and without him, I would be a sorry shadow of the person I am. And yet, he reminded me of something the other day: our first trip together, just the two of us, in the summer of 1978, when I was almost nine years old. In August of that year, we drove from Chicago down into Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains, before continuing on to Georgia, where we'd meet other family members. We stopped and stayed a couple of nights in Gatlinburg , Tennessee , a quaint rustic town proud of its simple...

I see the picture in my mind's eye: me, my mom, and my mom's sister Cay. Is my father in the snapshot, too, or was he the one pointing the camera at us? The photo is in an album somewhere in my parents' home. In it, we are sitting on the deck of a houseboat, floating on the Mississippi River, each of us wearing a white T-shirt with a large navy blue logo of the Playboy bunny in the center of it. It's the mid-1970s, and my father has taken some time off from work (Playboy Enterprises, therefore the shirts) so that we could have a bit of Mark Twain summer adventure on the great Mississippi. We've rented this houseboat, maybe for a week. I don't remember how long the trip was, or what our starting and ending points were. I suppose it was a round trip, and the starting point couldn't have been far from Chicago, which is where we were living at the time. Many details are fuzzy, but not the overall sensation of excitement. I know now that this trip was likely plan...