Memories

The Fewcher

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It was my least favorite question in school. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

On one occasion, I remember being forced (forced!) to draw what I pictured my life to look like … in … the … few … cher-er-er. (Echoes.) If I had had the sense of humor I now claim to have, I would have drawn someone who was capable of drawing. Maybe I would have drawn someone holding a board with many colors on it. The person would be wearing a smock. And a beret. (That was how Mr. V—, our art teacher in elementary school, dressed. It was almost a parody of a cliché of someone’s parodied cliché of what an artist looks like.) The caption to my drawing would have stated that I hoped I would be able to draw when I was a grown-up.
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Me and Mr. Claus

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I know Santa Claus, which I know sounds like a tall tale …

I do not remember the moment I learned that the many Misters and Missuses Claus that we encountered in person or saw on TV were “not real”; the fact that there was no “a-ha” moment leads me to assume that I never bought the story. Maybe so, maybe not. There is at least one photo of my sister and me in a “portrait with Santa,” and I remember the typical session. I knew, just knew, that the fellow was not Santa, and I did not feel betrayed by this; I knew it was a guy overheating indoors in a snowsuit for reasons related to “things grown-ups do.” It did not make much sense to me, to be a grown-up wearing a snowsuit indoors, but I did not envy adults the many things that they did, said, claimed, acted as if, and always eventually emphatically insisted made sense.
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Memory Screen

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
“The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.” — “Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and the dross beneath them; our lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand it by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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