Memories

My Surreal Life

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A young woman and a child, a toddler young enough for a stroller but old enough to walk alongside it, entered the elevator my friend and I were already on. The doors shut, and the child looked at me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Hi, Mark.” Precisely enunciated. Distinctly direct.

Now, Mark happens to be my name. I had never seen the woman, or boy, before. My friend looked at me and I suppose he saw a shocked look come over my face. When we got off the elevator—not at our floor, but the next available, because I was spooked—he asked, “Do you know them?”

“No. That was random. Did that kid say my name?”

“Yeah. Definitely. As if he was about to tell you something important.”
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Home Is Where You Hang

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are about a half-a-dozen “I almost lived there” cities that sit in my memory like books unread on a shelf in a library I no longer have a membership card to. Two suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of those place-names sounds to me like a bullet whistling past my head, an anecdote of a disaster that I did not have to watch unfold in front of my eyes as if I was a bystander in my life instead of a participant. I had quite a few disasters in the places in which I actually resided; and, yes, I might have found recovery in any one of those fine cities and be celebrating many more years of recovery than I now have, but I did not. Life is perfect where I reside, even in its many imperfections. I may have made a lot of errors, but no mistakes.
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A Nickname-less Life

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One can not, or ought not, nickname oneself. This is not a hard-and-fast social rule, but it is similar to the unspoken rule about not declaring oneself humble. The person who volunteers that he or she is humble often is not. An exception comes when the humble person is speaking self-deprecatingly.

Every once in a while, I have desired a cool nickname, a moniker that precedes me wherever I roam. “Lefty” is a great nickname—Steve Carlton and Phil Mickelson both carry that name with distinction, but I am right-handed. No one goes by the name “Righty.” “Write-y”? No. No one needs a nickname that is a pun, a rhyme no less, and would always need a follow-up explanation: “‘Cause he calls himself a writer, get it?”
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