"Monkey Mind" and other memories

Monkey Mind

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.

I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

by Steve Orlen, from The Elephant's Child: New and Selected Poems

This poem too--I like it, not because I have some similar memory because I don't. But this morning's Writers Almanac poem opens up the crap shoot that growing up is--really, that life itself is. Who knows what sticks in our minds and souls? Nobody. Nor does anyone know why. Some impressions and perceptions simply don't die. Instead, they knock about in our conscious minds as if they had their own life, more often than not with no particularly understandable cause.

Little more than a week ago--and I wrote it here--I got up early in the morning in an unfamiliar cabin and heard, from my own feet, the sound of my grandfather's slippers shuffling over the kitchen linoleum in our house fifty years ago. My grandfather died when I was six. In what crack or crevice did that impression hide for all those years? And why did it stay? There's nothing particularly untoward about the memory or the man, but the sound was there as if it were yesterday. I felt myself to be my grandpa.

Nothing about his funeral has stayed. I have no memory whatsoever of that event. Or do I? Perhaps some morning, brushing my teeth, some ancient memory will emerge out of whatever ooze holds all these strange impressions and perceptions. Who knows?

In the poem, the issues of a certain childhood event have never really left the narrator's consciousness. What he remembers is being swatted unjustly for typical childhood curiosity, in an equation that, back then, made no particular sense. He's much older today, and presumably he understands his father's reaction way back then; but he's never forgiven his father because, in a way, he can't. The images from that odd event haven't really shifted in shape and design from the day it happened so long ago.

I think of myself as a victim of all of this--judging my own strangely haunting memories. But even more fearfully, I wonder what memories I inflicted on my own children. The old man, after all, probably remembers nothing of the events which haunt the kid--nothing. What don't I know about what I said or did when my children were simply curious--or simply kids? Maybe I'd rather not know.

A mind and its memory is curious thing. And even scary.