Memories are often, for me, like smoke drifting over my head and then evaporating - just a wisp and then gone. The other morning while putting on make up, I remembered that my family once attended church with President Eisenhower.
Now, that memory wasn’t a surprise. If I’d seen it as a true-false question on a test about my life, I could have easily marked it "true." But the memory wasn’t fleshed out; it was a mere whisper, flirting with me as I applied blush to what used to be the roses in my cheeks.
What? Did we really do that?
Yes we did, and this is how it happened.
I believe it was around 1956 and we are visiting Gettysburg as many good Americans did and still do, when we heard that the President and his wife were spending the weekend at their farm there and they would be attending church the next day. I think my mother must have read it in the paper. She also noted an admonition that well-wishers, if they arrived at a certain time, would be able to see the President and First Lady from the sidewalk across the street from the church, but they would be kept behind police barriers for the safety of all involved.
What happened the next morning was a combination of my family’s adherence to the notion that Sunday equaled church no matter where you happened to be, and my mother’s cunning. I’m pretty sure that, good Methodists that we were, we’d packed our church clothes next to our binoculars and we'd planned to visit a local Methodist Church in the midst of our trip. But Mama, at the last minute, decided we should at least try to look Presbyterian on that one day to see if we could add our own personal family chapter to the American history books by bypassing the giddy throngs as we made our way, with what I'm sure was a1950's version of white protestent condescension, into the very same sanctuary where the President was opening his hymnal and tuning up his vocal chords.
All I need to add is that Mama's plan worked and I do now remember the way the leader of the free world's bald head added a special shine to the front pew of a Presbyterian Church on a certain Sunday in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over fifty years ago, and that, furthermore, this particular family chapter has now been written and the memory has become a Norman Rockwell painting in my mind.
This is why I believe that writing down memories is so important, even if we don’t think of ourselves as good writers. The documentation helps to give substance and color to those wisps and whispers, or as my friend, Efton, puts it so beautifully: The "putting in words" somehow gels the flurry of blurred memories - turning a bit of a fogged past into a very clear moment - one moment otherwise lost in the storm of going on with life.
What wisps and fogged pasts do you have that could use some articulation?
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