The Thinnest Gold (a revised story)

There is a memory I am told often. I was too fresh in the world then to remember it now, so my mothers voice fills the colors in for me instead. She sits in one of our old kitchen chairs and begins with Grandma and Grampa, with their driving hats and wide smiles. Almost every year, when my sisters and I were young, they would drive their old Buick across the country to our home in Oregon. We loved it when they came to visit. My sisters and I would wait patiently on the porch in the spring, or behind our big living room window in the winter. The gravel of our driveway would crunch and suddenly all the waiting was over: They were here. Then my father would open the door and his three girls would flood out; surrounding the weary travelers, taking them by the hand, hugging their knees.

My mother listens even when she speaks, and her smell is clean and lipstick.

She tells me my grandparents would take me on long walks when they came to visit. She would stand behind the living room window and watch me toddling between the both of them. I would stop soon after we passed the mailbox. There was a grassy ditch there, paralleling the road that lead to my house. I would stop there and squat down, with feet firmly planted and bottom brushing the ground, in that child’s pose that comes so easily to kids. Examining the ground, I would tenderly sort the grass and pick out a dandelion, a rock, the dying stalk of Queen Anne’s Lace. I wanted my grandparents to see, and I was fascinated with the tiny organisms.

My mom usually ends here, but then my dad picks up the story. He holds his hands up with the tips of all his fingers touching. He moves them softly, rubbing them over each other like a jewelry man sorting the thinnest gold – memorizing its veins and malleability.

“This is what you would do,” He says, “I saw you do that a hundred times.”

        

My dad is the subtle thespian of the family.

It feels nice to hold a collected memory like that, all curled up and tucked inside of you. It’s nice to hold a moment like that with my grandparents, who lived far away then and are separated now by opaque time and the curtain of life. But what tethers me to that memory is the moment I lean down to study the small weed. I am trying to understand my steady fascination with the dandelion things, small worlds that we barely even see.

         Eventually I started coloring in my own memories. I remember sitting in the old kitchen chairs at that house on Black Bear Drive. They where a scratchy 70's beige: if I had known other kitchen chairs during that time I probably would have been more skeptical of their dated yellow texture. But these were our chairs, they belonged to my world. Ten years later the padding sewn inside would start to creep out the stitches after ten thousand games of pretend. My dad would plead and cajole us to fix them up with sewing needle and thread. But my sisters and I had been to other kitchens by that point. Staunch in our consumer training we smugly thought: just buy new ones.

My dad is the subtly sentimental one of the family.

When we were young, though, these chairs where the objects of our affections, the foundation of our games of pretend. The rules to these games were adjustable and were most often adjusted by me, the eldest. The plot of these games, however original or inspired they began, always turned out to be some sort of escape. Escape from The Sea Monster, from The Abominable Snow Man, from Mom With the Vacuum.

We always made it. (Though there were times that the latter prevailed and we were banned to the out of doors to make way for the cleaning rumble of vacuuming monsters.) Still- my sister Bailey and I were quite the heroines. We would dangle on the precipice of make-believe danger until our littlest sibling, Maddie, would be close to tears in fear and angst over our make-believe safety.

But I made it through, all pretend appendages still intact....

The question that haunts me still, however, is what if Maddie was right? At that age she was still examining her own dandelion worlds. She was privy to sensitive information that Bailey and I must have exchanged for faster reflexes and video game systems long ago. I find myself wondering sometimes if I were ever truly at risk, of losing something. She was always so scared for us during the cliff-hanging climax of our adventures; so breathless and teary-eyed.

There are those nervous dreams where you try with all your might to get a message across, your mouths opening and closing like unsatisfied goldfish. No sound escapes.

Our old chairs now sit in the kitchen of our new house, faithful runes remaining from the earliest years of the family. Our own little Easter Island. The rules of the games they played their parts in are long since mist among the runes - fuzzy memories we bring out and polish with talk until a film covers the clearest parts. We laugh at ourselves. We have lost nothing, we think.

But maybe we are wrong.

         These two memories fit snug in the cavity near my heart. They have been there so long they are a part of it now. I would feel their absence if I granted them worlds of their own. But if you were to tease them out of me, I think they would open up like a set of Matryoshka dolls, like the painted collection my aunt brought us back from Russia. Opening to reveal until all you have is a last true remaining essence. And when that world within worlds is held in your palm, I hope you would hold it like the thinnest of gold.