Category: Memoir

About five years ago I started writing a memoir. I kept at it for a little while, writing about 1,000 words a day for a few weeks. I hadn’t yet been to therapy and there were many things I didn’t really understand about my life, but I still find the unfinished memoir to be a fascinating look into my own past. I’ve decided to post it in installments here, with only a few redactions. You can find the other sections by clicking the Memoir category.

2.

This is the story of the 28 years in between the plastic spear and the telephone call. It’s the story of my emotional and political awakening. Of 25 moves in seven states and two countries. Of 10 years of marriage, more than a dozen jobs, two children, and three last names. This is as much of it as I can remember and feel like telling.

The remembering part isn’t easy. There’s so much of my early life that I’ve forgotten or intentionally erased. Add to that the normal tendency of kids to forget a lot of the things that happen to them when they’re very young, and you’ve got a life that in many ways seems to start in high school or even later.

For years, I’ve had a strong desire to tell this story, and a fear that I have no real story to tell. That my life is no different from that of thousands or millions of other kids from broken homes who go through life feeling like one foot is on the ground and the other is sinking in quicksand. I haven’t had it particularly rough in many ways. What lessons do I have to impart to anyone else?

But I’m so attracted to language. To words. I love to read, and not just for the content of the stories, but also for the words themselves. Michael Pollan expressed the same love of the wash of language, the flood of words, in his beautiful book A Place Of My Own. I read entire pages and paragraphs and books and can’t remember what I read five minutes later, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the act that matters, that grabs my attention and holds it, that carries me into that other world.

And with this love of reading is the unrequited love of the writer. I’ve given my heart to the concept of a memoir, but I have no expectation that the act of writing will love me back.

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About five years ago I started writing a memoir. I kept at it for a little while, writing about 1,000 words a day for a few weeks. I hadn’t yet been to therapy and there were many things I didn’t really understand about my life, but I still find the unfinished memoir to be a fascinating look into my own past. I’ve decided to post it in installments here, with only a few redactions. You can find the other sections by clicking the Memoir category.

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1.

I remember my father’s legs.

He’s sitting in a green easy chair next to one of those floor lamps that has a shelf midway up the lamp. There’s a beer on the shelf, and he’s reading a newspaper. I can’t see his face, because I haven’t seen my biological father since I was four years old. I’ve only ever seen one picture of him that I can remember, and that was a couple years ago.

The room is suffused with the sickly yellow light of the lamp, and the beer is the same color. That kind of faded yellow that you only see in houses that were last decorated in the 70’s, or in your mind’s eye as you look back on childhood.

In this memory, I see Art, my father, lean down and offer me a sip of his beer. I take a sip. I always tell everyone that I’ve never had a drop of alcohol in my life, and I don’t trust this memory enough to know whether or not that’s actually true. I’m maybe three years old. Maybe two.

In my next memory, I’m in a small kitchen with a black-and-white checkerboard floor. There’s a little wooden table in one corner of the kitchen, and two women are sitting at the table talking. I think one of them is my mother, although I can’t see them distinctly enough to remember.

I don’t hear the knock on the door, but I know someone’s there, and I turn and cross the kitchen. The walls are painted hospital grey, and the door is the same color. When I open it, my father is standing there. He has brown hair and a brown mustache, though once again I’m not sure when I added those elements to the image – as a child or recently. My father hands me a plastic spear, maybe three feet long, and then he’s gone. He never enters the house. It’s my birthday. I’m four years old.

Now fast-forward 28 years. I’m putting my three-year-old son to bed, which means reading him two books and then laying down next to him while he falls asleep. As I’m lying there, I feel a switch flip inside me, and I know that if I go downstairs right now, I can call my father on the phone.

I’ve had his number for years, but I’ve never been able to call. I’m not sure what’s stopped me. Maybe it’s not knowing what I want from the contact. Or maybe I’m still sorting out my feelings about my mother and second father, and I’m not ready to take this on, too.

But tonight, right now, I can do it. I go downstairs and find his number on the computer. Seconds later he’s there on the other end of the phone.

“Hello?”

“May I speak with Art Borders please?”

“Who’s this?”

“Jason.”

“Jason who?”

“Jason from upstate New York.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

And so we launch a 90-minute conversation that includes apologies, tears, the word “son” several times, and a strange feeling like I was having this interaction with someone I’d dialed at random out of the phonebook.

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