I am not attending the Olympic Club these days, my luncheon speakers’ club, even though my mobility has improved enough to enable me to do so. I’m not sure I know why I have opted out. Today, a Thursday, brings my choice to mind because this is the weekly meeting day of the Olympic Club.
I don’t miss giving speeches. My public speaking skills have deteriorated over time; as with so many things, I must ruefully acknowledge that I am not so good as once I was. My gestures are stiff and unconvincing; my voice reedy and flat, without inflection.
But, still, I have things to say and I enjoy the discipline of keeping a speech
to eight minutes, (OK, truth be told: that always was hard for me to do. More often than
not, I overran my time and suffered the time-keeper’s clanging censure.)
This morning
I awoke with this notion: why not retreat and become a speech-writer? Prepare and script an eight-minute speech and
post it on Northwest Ruminations? So, here is the first of what may
become a Thursday feature on NWR: Olympic Talks.
Olympians: if these scripts trigger thoughts you'd like to use, feel free. Or, if you'd simply like to deliver one of these as practice for reading a speech (itself a skill to be practiced) or to lift parts of one, I'd be honored. Feel free.
The Poignancy, The Pungency of Memory
My purpose, in this talk, is to get you to reflect on the power of memory.
I had stayed
overnight at Peter’s after another late-night, Senior-bash, still celebrating
our graduation from Sidwell. It was a warm, bright Bethesda morning, the kind
of morning that forewarns Washingtonians that it will be a scorcher. Peter and
I saddled up his old Plymouth coupe and drove over to Chevy Chase to call on Mary
-- his girl, my dear friend, our classmate Mary.
Our plan -- no, a mere notion -- was to drive around a bit and hang out and see what the day
revealed. Perhaps we’d pick up Barb, my girl, also a Chevy Chaser. I had never before
been to Mary’s, so was more than a bit awed as Peter pulled up before an imposing brick
Colonial Revival home, tall and stately, just the sort a decorated Rear Admiral
might own seven years after the War.
A somber gentleman
answered the door. He politely but firmly turned us away. “The family has suffered
a tragic event” said he “and is unable to receive visitors. Thank you for coming.”
I still don’t know who he was; a friend
of family? Perhaps from the Navy Dept.? Perhaps a funeral-home person? He was
firmly tight-lipped about the “event.”
We soon pieced
together that Peter and I had arrived about an hour after they had scraped up
the Admiral’s body from the drive out back of the house beneath the third-story
window out of which the Admiral had dived headlong: another belated casualty of
WWII.
We now call such PTSD, a glib, too-comfortable label we’ve used to paper
over tragedy, as if by naming it, we’ve denied it wrenching at our gut.
End of summer: we callow teens went our ways, I to HamiltoSn, Mary to Smith, Peter to Princeton, Barb to Skidmore. Mary was not invited to Barb's and my wedding. By then, she had dropped away from our circle. I never saw Mary again.
But the chagrin of arriving at the wrong place at the wrong time has never left me. The feeling of shameful inadequacy, the somber firmness of the man at the door; the warmth of the sun, the sound of the Plymouth; these details and images I cannot leave behind. They haunt me to this day. I trust they always will.
This was my first confrontation with the reality of Loss. Of Grief. Yet there was no confrontation; it was all second-hand. Pungeant, none-the-less. I would have to wait years to own grief and loss of my own.
Do childhood or teenage memories haunt you? Are they pungent? Are they poignant? Do you treasure them or wish to be rid of them? Do they come unbidden from a secret somewhere mysteriously triggered by an unknown what?
~~~~
I live in a
house made of memory. A house furnished with hidden triggers. Don't you? Do not we all?
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