The Pungency, The Poignancy of Memory

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 home to me 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. But, still, I have things to say and I enjoy the discipline of keeping a speech to eight minutes, (OK, truth be told: I found that hard 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 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.

 

 The Poignancy, The  Pungency 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 pick up 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 we pulled up to 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 later 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 have learned to 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 Hamilton, Mary to Smith, Peter to Princeton, Barb to Skidmore. I married Barb but Mary was not invited. 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 seriousness 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.

Do teenage memories haunt you? Are they pungent? Do you treasure them or wish to be rid of them? Are they poignant? Do they come unbidden, from somewhere unknown?

~~~~

I live in a house made of memory. Don't you? Do not we all?