The shirt smells like my Baba before he was a father. Before he had a baby boy who’d shake his diapered bum to the Bronski Beat. And soon after: me. His daughter whom he calls “the girl,” to whom he’s passed on a reflex for absence. The shirt smells like what I can only describe as a stretch. Those years when you are responsible only for yourself and develop, as a result, a potent sense of anonymity, despite combing the days for purpose. When, briefly, nothing is catastrophic though everything feels precisely gut-poignant, and falling asleep comes easy, and you’re still not sure where to look when smiling. And isn’t that nice?
It smells like those years, between 1973 and 1977, when my father, for a period, was living with his roommate Bruce, painting houses in the summer and working at a jazz club where, one night he manned the lights for Gerry Mulligan and, another time, Charles Mingus. The shirt smells like paint drying and the sound of Mingus’s hard bop, and while it smells like none of those things, it does. In remembering to forget—which is altogether different from forgetting—I’ve picked up other tendencies. Like unlearning in general, but also, I’ve trained my ears to sniff out trails. I’ve trained my nose to interpret sounds. Smells conjure scenes from movies, for example. Basically, and for what it’s worth—not much!—I’m proficient at having my attention drawn away. I’ve adjusted my senses to life’s incoherence. The sweet whiff of gasoline is Tippi Hedren clutching her cheeks as cars explode and birds circle on high; is Angela Bassett walking away while the white BMW burns.
There was a period in college when the sound of photocopiers in my library’s basement was, I’m uncertain why: blue. Perhaps their ceaselessness reminded me of waves. Paralleling the surf and sway, and roll, on loop. Paper shooting out the tray like lapping ocean water foaming on the beach.
Putty brown is, forever, Faye Dunaway’s edged enunciation of “Ecumenical Liberation Army,” because isn’t that whole movie various shades of putty brown? The smell of clementine peels on my fingertips at Christmas is Nat King Cole’s confiding baritone. Sarah Vaughan singing “Lullaby of Birdland” feels like the touch of worn cotton; a rotation of old Tshirts my mother wears when she’s cooking, listening to jazz compilations, snapping her fingers as Vaughan’s voice elegantly ladles the words “weepy old willow.”
And when I hear Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”—that pendulous elegy, sad but sleuthing, like a gloomy gumshoe’s anthem—I smell my father’s plaid shirt. Its collar has since lost its stiff. One button snaps with less snap! It hangs in my closet in Brooklyn, sharing a hanger with two other shirts—an indignity I should fix.
There are so many photos I’ve never seen and questions I do not ask, because seeing them and asking them, I worry, precipitates an end. The difference between collection and memorial has, in recent years, become less clear to me. My instinct to write things down often feels like obituary. And with my parents, a gratuitous gamble with time.
Will I regret not soliciting details about their trip to Nicaragua? The red dress. That straw hat. Yes and no. There are, as ever, the tokens that provide a layout of my parents’ thinking; how they’ve never ceased to interrogate the world and how narrative, as a practice, oils their rationale.
I grew up in a house of stories. The good fortune of having parents who moved away young from their parents—from their initial understanding of the world—but never completely. Who speak in layers and have held, each in his and her way, a belief that symbolism can gel life’s experiences. Can inspire material or an event to get passed down.
Like my brother’s middle name: Sandino. It was winter 1984. My mother was six months pregnant when they visited Nicaragua. In pictures, she is growing out her perm and three months shy of becoming a mother for the first time. She was then, I wonder, a boiled-down combination of cluelessness and fear, prospect, pleasure, thick doubt, and spells of demoralizing blues. Though, knowing my mother’s removedness, it’s possible she wasn’t anything too specific.
Far more than me, my mother is in touch—or at ease—with flows and overflow, particularly, and contends coolly, unusually so, with spats. For someone so angry about the state of things, fist up and ready to fight the fight, protesting and holding up banners or hanging them from her balcony, making calls on behalf of, hosting conference speakers at her home, showing up in solidarity, unionizing the teachers at her college, my mother does seem, on average, unbothered. There have been times when her disposition is equivalent to that of an email’s auto-response away message: a calmly prompt, matter-of-fact no-show. She’s there, but not exactly. My mother has proven that a person can be supportive yet remain unreachable, and how the combination has its virtues.
Despite my interest, there are moments from my parents’ past that do not belong to me. The straw hat was, feasibly, nothing more than something silly you buy on vacation when you’re young and in love, unburdened but married because marriage was made for the ill-prepared. And anyhow, strong winds blow away straw hats, or they collapse and splinter on the flight home. I’ve never seen a straw hat survive the state in which it was bought. Straws hats, in my experience, are whim-things. Unsubstantial.
There are nights when I go to bed a little foolish and pretend the world is a disco ball and that the stars are simply reflected dots. That none of this is too dire and how the impossibility of knowing everything is an advantage. Most children grow up and plan to, at some stage, sit with a parent, a pad of paper, a voice recorder, and listen. Most children, despite good intentions, never make it happen.
Perhaps we’re waiting for our porch. We defer, defer, defer, and make excuses until we’ve won life’s ultimate lottery: the porch. The kind that wraps around. There’s something neutral about the conditions of its build: inside’s privacy, but outside, it’s an extension that stipulates the promise of delay. Imagine if our foreheads had porches jutting out from them? Maybe our brains would experience some reprieve.
On porches, conversation flows freely because silences, while weighty, aren’t strained. The faint interruption of a neighbor’s car pulling up the driveway or leaves rustling, or the benefits of a view in August, kink the air pressure that might exist between two people. A breeze jangles wind chimes and gently jolts us from ourselves. It’s harder to speak selfishly on a porch. Even when it’s hot, no one overheats. Picking a fight on a porch means you’ve missed the point entirely.