Memories

No Cheating

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wanted the ultimate magic kit when I was a kid, but as with so many things in life, disappointment lay in the fact that the magic kits grew more complex, more “magical,” only with higher prices.

Each of them included a “magic wand,” which was just a wooden dowel painted black, or, in the more expensive kits, painted black with a white tip, because a white tip equals classy. The photo of the kid on the magic box with the white tipped wand often showed the kid in tails and with a top hat. (I am sure that because of kids like me, or because of just me, the toy companies needed to add the disclaimer, “Hat and tails not in package.”)
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Meeting Myself

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The child has few memories, so those he has are detailed.

We were in my hometown for some reason one summer Sunday afternoon a couple years ago and I said to my girlfriend that I wanted to show her where I grew up. (As if I have grown up.) We drove down roads I used to bike on, walk on.

I grew up in the suburbs, in upstate New York, in the 1970s and ’80s, a neighborhood without sidewalks, where kids biked across their neighbors’ lawns (well, I did) without fear of criticism. I remember that I knew which houses had dogs that were poorly restrained (so I could avoid those lawns or else find a new speed in my pumping little legs) and which houses were simply scary for reasons no one could explain but everyone knew which houses simply seemed scary.

(Years later, in high school, I was fundraising or campaigning for something and I dared, out of my OCD-ish sense/need to knock on every single door in the neighborhood, I knocked on the door of one of the houses that I always thought was scary. The owner was as friendly and nice as could be. I felt like I had discovered something.)
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Some Memories of Clawman Treefeller

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wish you could have known Matt Coleman. Many did, but not enough. There was not enough time. “Matt’s heart was so big, it surrounded him,” one of his colleagues wrote in a memorial tribute.

I am grateful that I happen to think this about so many people that I have met, those sentences like “You ought to know so-and-so,” or “You should have met my friend, X,” but I am frustrated that I have not said it out loud often enough to the people about whom I thought this. Matt already knew most of my friends, anyway, and the one friend I introduced Matt to, well, Matt asked her out. Or she asked him.

A person’s end should not be what the world knows of them, though, and eleven years ago today, August 11, 2011, my friend Matt Coleman was murdered. No one’s death should fight for attention with the person’s life, so I will briefly give the end, and then we will celebrate a gorgeous life.

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