Memories
Walking past stone castles, on green grass. Balancing myself on the curbs, they are my own part of the universe. My father and I hacked this together, that the curbs can be our own balancing beams, in our own universe. It was our way of owning property together. We would walk around for hours, and would not see any roads. The air was always clear on these days, and it was never too hot. I had a jacket I liked, that my parents picked out, that had blue and yellow and red fuzzy checkered squares. I would pick up a stick and walk with it, my stick. The world would be limited, but full, and more than enough. It was not quaint or cozy. I never thought if other parts of the world were like this, and never checked until 15 years later where exactly this was.
There were suits of armor in the windows. I didn’t question if they were real or not. They were made of metal, and each was the size of a man. Some were behind glass, some were behind ropes. Some you could touch. I looked in awe at them. I did not understand at the time what somebody would be wearing that to protect themselves from. Knights could wear this and not be harmed, in sword battle. I did not know what they would be fighting about. It was an image in my head already that there was something like this sometime in the past, and now I was seeing it in real life in physical manifestation in front of me. I did not know what it was doing there. My father never tried to explain these objects. It didn’t occur to me that he didn’t know much about them — it also didn’t occur to me that did. We looked at them together, and we were looking at the same universe.
There was a wooden beam in the air at a jungle gym at a park, on top of the monkey bars. I climbed over the top, to walk across it, like with the curbs. My dad cheered me on. My mom cheered me on too but was worried, but my dad was exhilarated for me.
These images stand out to me, and remind me of Scotland, if I were to think of one place I’d been that reminds me of these memories, as an entire country, or as a place, rather than textures and places in my mind. I think of the large cemetery in Glasgow, up on a grassy hill. If I wanted to visit my memories, I would be better off visiting this place, rather than finding the places that inspired the original memories.
I’d been back to the place with the knights. It is different from the memories. It is New Hope, Pennsylvania.
In all these memories, there is the clean air. There is both stillness and spaciousness. These are the memories I associate with most, when I think about my father.