The Jeep

Why does a child remember something? What in the child's mind creates a connection so strong that decades later, recall is instantaneous? Obviously the memory is significant to the child, but why? and how is it that we remember something so excruciatingly clearly but others in the house—even the primary player in our memory's happening—do not?

For example, why does the smell of freshly cut, damp grass remind me of a holding wire slanted from the antenna on the house to a stake in the yard? Why does the humidity and stillness of an oncoming thunderstorm remind me of fireflies and field stubble under my bare feet?

And why is the most memorable ride I have taken—and I've had many—the one in a Jeep with my father?

My Dad did this mysterious thing called work. He would go to work in the morning, while I played, napped, drew pictures with crayons, fingerpainted, and roller skated. He would come home a bit after my afternoon nap, sometimes tired, but never in my memory upset or angry. Work, however mysterious, was what he did. Children accept facts as inescapable, because they have nothing to compare them against. Things. Just. Are.

When I was six years old, Dad's work intruded on me as an evil thing as I was uprooted from the only home I knew in Levittown, New York to a home in a place called southern Maryland. A neighborhood of tract homes with playmates next door and down the street with older boys playing football in the evening street was suddenly replaced with fields of tobacco and long lanes of dirt overgrown with broad-limbed, deciduous trees. The emptiness was disturbing.

Six years later, it was not only home, but the forests, fields, and lanes were the best friends I had. I told them stories, even making them the heroes of my stories. They were alive.

All of this is background, because the winter of 1966 was memorable. Snow storm after snow storm piled up, until the world was adrift in four feet of snow. No doubt there is historical data somewhere that indicates how much snow fell, but all I needed was the measure of foot to waist. How I loved snow—no school; old, familiar places suddenly surprised me; nothing is the same, and the eye is delighted with new ways to see. I still love snow (so sue me).

This snow socked us in, being so far out in the country, and Dad didn't go to work. Odd thing, that. We lit sterno to cook; we climbed into bed fully clothed to keep warm; the plastic stapled to the door frames whistled and billowed to the wind. But I bundled up and went out. And out. And out. I walked lanes with trees so laden with wet snow their branches bent over the lane. I could stand in the middle of the uphill stretch of lane at the end of the forest, look left and taste the snow off the branch from a tree on the left, and without moving, look right and taste the snow off a branch from a tree on the right. They were honoring me. A bower of friends.

But the world goes on, even when the country lane is still buried deep and frozen. My father had to get back to work; I had to go back to school. Enter "The Jeep." No matter how faulty this might be, my memory was that this Jeep was open to the air (I suspect it was one of those with the vinyl windows), and it was in this thoroughly delightful contraption my father took me to school. Near the busstop for one of my nemeses, we pulled up behind my bus—No. 64—and there against the back window of the bus were pressed the faces of my friends. I waved and sat smug. My DAD was driving me to school in this neat thing called a Jeep. Without knowing he had done so, my father made me queen for a day.

Of course, the snow melted, I boarded No. 64 each schoolday, I had sums to do, baseballs to hit, bases to run. But from time to time, I'd get the crack across the knuckles with the ruler for daydreaming, and even the sting wouldn't stop me from smiling inside: a day in a Jeep with my Dad beats a reprimand any day.

Sometimes it's what we do with our families that creates just that one memory a child will never forget. It is no less important for being forgotten by everyone else. I remembered, and in the end, did illogical, crazy, off-the-cuff things with my kids. I wonder what they remember.